Wayne David: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I met the Wales CBI only last week, and I recently held a meeting with the Federation of Small Businesses to listen to its specific concerns, and in March I shall be participating in the FSB's national conference.

Henry Bellingham: I thank the Minister for that reply. Ministers keep telling the House how much they are doing to support small firms, but can the Minister therefore explain why Ministers did not do more to resist the job-destroying EU agency workers directive, which was vehemently opposed by every single small business organisation?

Wayne David: The Government are certainly doing everything they can to help small businesses—there is no doubt about that. However, it is also important to recognise that we are talking specifically about Wales, and we can point to initiatives that have been taken by the Welsh Assembly Government, such as the ProAct and ReAct programmes. We can also allude to the fact that significant sums of European money have gone into these initiatives. They are helping small businesses and the people who are directly affected by the economic downturn, so I think it is very important that, unlike Opposition Members, we take a balanced view of the European Union. I believe that, on balance, our membership of the EU is positive and helpful, and many thousands of people in Wales would testify to that fact.

Paul Murphy: I have had no indication at all that there will be any change of plan as far as that huge investment in Wales is concerned. The Government are committed to it but I am sure that, when the time comes, there will be a proper statement to this House of Commons.

Gordon Brown: My hon. Friend has been a great supporter of the car industry and its development in his own city and round the country. I believe that the car industry is a sector with a strong future. That is why we want to unlock loans of up to £1.3 billion, guaranteed for low carbon initiatives in cars. That is also why we are giving loans and guarantees of up to £1 billion for lower carbon initiatives for non-European Investment Bank projects. That is why we are discussing training grants, which would be in addition to short-time working, so that we can help people in jobs to keep their jobs. We will do everything we can to help the car industry. This is the difference. We know that in times like these we must act to help—but I am not sure that the Conservatives support us in this.

Gordon Brown: Baroness Royall, the Leader of the House of Lords, has taken immediate action to deal with the problem. All of us are deeply concerned. These are serious allegations, which have to be dealt with. That is why we immediately set up the committee on privileges to look at how a proper code of conduct could be introduced; that is why we investigated the interests, which is happening under Baroness Prashar, and that is why Lady Royall said this morning:
	"If the current allegations are proven, we may need as well to consider emergency sanctions".
	Those are the steps that we are taking. I hope that it is true of all parties in the House that we wish to root out any mistakes that have been made, and ensure that they do not happen again.

Theresa Villiers: No.
	BAA has yet to meet the Government's 40 per cent. target for public transport use, which it was supposed to achieve eight years ago. The proportion of people using public transport to access Heathrow has actually fallen in the last couple of years, and the company has downgraded its own targets on the issue. BAA has talked about Airtrack for years, but there is no guarantee that the scheme will go ahead, and London councils of all political complexions, representing all 33 of the city's local authorities, do not believe that the Piccadilly line will be able to cope with expected uplift in passengers.
	Thirdly, I turn to an even more serious problem—noise.

Theresa Villiers: I completely agree with my hon. Friend, and I will respond to that point in more detail later.
	The Secretary of State's assurances on noise simply lack credibility because the Government have made every effort to duck their promises in the past. Let us take their assurance that expansion would not lead to an increase in the area covered by the 57-decibel noise contour. Even setting aside the criticism of the validity of that contour—such criticism came from both the World Health Organisation and the DFT's own research study, "Attitudes to Noise from Aviation Sources in England", or ANASE—the Government use the 2002 base year for their calculations, a year when Concorde was still flying. The way in which the Civil Aviation Authority's noise model operates means that that the demise of Concorde gives the headroom to give the green light to major increases in flight movements by conventional planes, without exceeding the noise tests set.

Theresa Villiers: Not just at the moment.
	Even more controversially, as I have said, the documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 show the DFT and BAA working closely together on a re-forecasting, and reverse-engineering the projections for future flight mix to try to meet the tests that the Government had set and get the answers that Ministers wanted. Even then, the Government are still relying on a massive leap forward in aircraft technology to enable them to reconcile their promises on noise with the increase in flights that they want to see, including the delivery of the now notorious twin-engine "green jumbo" that is not in the design portfolios of either major aircraft manufacturer, and yet is expected by the DFT to replace completely all 747s by 2030 and virtually all units of Boeing's successor to the 747, which is not even on the market yet.
	It is this history that undermines the Government's credibility when they make more promises on "green slots". When challenged, the Secretary of State was unable to give one single example of a model of plane green enough or clean enough to qualify to use the new slots, and it is a major concern that documents published alongside the statement on Heathrow contain no explanation of how the system for regulating the use of new slots will work. Most controversially of all when it comes to noise issues,  The Sunday Times recently reported that figures passed to the Civil Aviation Authority by BAA predict an increase in flights between 11 pm and 7 am from about 27,300 in 2006 to 35,000 once the third runway is operating at full capacity—an increase on today's levels of more than 25 per cent. We strongly and successfully resisted the Government's attempts to lift the cap on night flights, which can have such a corrosive impact on quality of life. Yet again I urge the Secretary of State to guarantee the future of the "night cap", and to drop his plans to review it.
	Then, of course, there is the climate change impact of a third runway. With 222,000 more flights, the airport could well become the largest single source of carbon dioxide in the United Kingdom, emitting nearly 27 million tonnes every year. According to research by Greenpeace, by 2050 emissions at that level could take up around a fifth of the entire UK carbon budget under the Climate Change Act 2008. Even with the increase in flights restricted to 125,000, and even if optimistic estimates of efficiency gains are factored in, Heathrow could still consume approximately one eighth of the nation's total carbon budget by 2050.

Theresa Villiers: My hon. Friend is right. We do not rule out the possibility of airport expansion in the south-east; neither, as he says, are we against flying.
	Let us return to that 125,000 cap. As I was saying, there is no guarantee as to how long it will last. There is to be a review in 2020 anyway, and it is unlikely that a new runway will even have been built by then. In reality, the Secretary of State's assurance about 125,000 flights takes us no further than the promises that Labour has already made, many years ago.

Theresa Villiers: No. I have been very generous in giving way, and I want to make some progress now.
	Whereas the environmental case against the third runway is compelling, the economic case, as I have said, is unconvincing. It is astounding that the Oxford Economic Forecasting study on which the current economic case is based fails to make any attempt to deduct the costs of increased air pollution, aircraft noise and a massive increase in congestion on some of the United Kingdom's most important roads. Neither is any attempt made to assess the carbon cost of inbound international flights. The CE Delft study for HACAN ClearSkies disputes the £120 value that OEF claims every passenger arriving in the United Kingdom contributes to the economy. It also concludes that OEF overestimates the extent of suppressed business demand for air travel at Heathrow. Indeed, the Government's whole analysis completely ignores the huge efforts being made to reduce the need for business travel. According to a recent survey conducted for the World Wildlife Fund, 89 per cent. of the FTSE 350 companies interviewed expected to cut flights over the next 10 years.

Theresa Villiers: Not at the moment.
	Much of the travel misery that so many people experience at Heathrow has more to do with poor customer service than with a shortage of runway space. The most notorious example of such poor service is the fiasco that accompanied the opening of terminal 5. Breaking up BAA's monopoly over so much airport capacity in the south-east and allowing passengers to vote with their feet and choose an airport run by a different operator should help drive improvements in service quality across all of London's airports.
	The Government's approach to Heathrow underestimates the potential that regional airports have to relieve pressure on capacity at airports in the south-east. Giving people a wider choice of destinations from their home airport has advantages in terms of passenger convenience and the regional balance of our economy. A switch to more direct flights from regional airports reduces emissions by cutting out the interim leg and relieves the road congestion caused by people having to drive to the south-east's airports. Sensible and proportionate expansion of regional airports on a case-by-case basis, with full regard to local and environmental planning concerns, should be an important part of any strategy to relieve overcrowding problems at Heathrow.
	In proposing a new high-speed rail line connecting Heathrow terminals directly with Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the channel tunnel link to Paris and Brussels, we have found a further means of relieving Heathrow's overcrowding problems and one that does not inflict— [Interruption.] I hear comments about Scotland. I believe what we are proposing would be an excellent foundation for a high-speed network that one day would stretch across the country and up to Scotland. We have made a firm commitment to going as far as Manchester and Leeds, whereas the Government are only talking in vague terms about possibly going as far as Manchester.

Theresa Villiers: I recognise the advantages of taking a line all the way to Scotland, but we have to be realistic about what we can promise, and we have to build such systems in stages. The history of our transport system demonstrates that we cannot deliver the whole lot all in one go. It is clear that constructing, and committing to, the link that we have proposed will be a major step along the road to delivering that wider- scale network, one day including, I very much hope, a full link between Scotland and London.

Theresa Villiers: Sorry, but no.
	Furthermore, the Conservative party believes that as a nation we can no longer put off the decision to start building a high-speed rail network in this country. Our proposal on high-speed rail would bring major advantages for rail users suffering from chronic levels of overcrowding. The boost for jobs would be felt right across the country, but the impact would be particularly strong in the midlands and the north.
	The Secretary of State's apparent conversion to high-speed rail was welcome, but unlike in our proposals, there is no firm commitment, no timeline and no attempt to get a new line past Birmingham. The new rail hub that the Government are considering for Heathrow will apparently be located at Old Oak Common, but a station more than 9 miles away from the airport, at Wormwood Scrubs, simply will not yield the benefits of the innovative proposal we have backed to connect Heathrow terminals directly with the main rail network to the west and the European high-speed network. What the Secretary of State still just does not get is the fact that high-speed rail could be an alternative to a third runway, not a sweetener for it.
	In conclusion, I make the following appeal to Members of all political parties. A third runway is not inevitable: there is a better way; there are credible alternatives. To all those who signed early-day motion 2344, I say that this is an important opportunity to ask the Government to listen to the millions of people who care about climate change and the dissenting voices on their own Back Benches, and to drop their plans for a third runway, which could have cause such devastating damage to our environment and our quality of life in this country.

Geoff Hoon: I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and add:
	"notes the Government's commitment in the 2003 Aviation White Paper to limit noise impacts and to be confident both that statutory air quality limits will be met and that public transport will be improved before expansion is permitted at Heathrow; welcomes the Government's new enforceable target to reduce UK aviation carbon dioxide emissions below 2005 levels by 2050, and the commitment that increases in capacity at Heathrow, beyond the additional 125,000 movements a year already agreed, will only be approved after a review in 2020 by the Committee on Climate Change of whether the UK is on track to meet this independently monitored target; notes that development at Heathrow will be conditional both on requirements that the size of the 57 decibel noise contour will not increase compared with 2002 and on adherence to the requirements of the European Air Quality Directive; notes the decision not to proceed with mixed mode, thereby ensuring that neighbouring residents will have predictable respite from aircraft noise; welcomes the proposal that new slots at Heathrow should be 'green slots' using the most efficient planes; recognises the economic and social importance of Heathrow; and welcomes proposals on ultra-low carbon vehicles and new rail links to the west of Heathrow and new high-speed services from London to the Midlands, the North and Scotland linked to Heathrow, to the benefit of the UK as a whole."
	I set out clearly in my statement on 15 January the key decisions that the Government had reached on the future of Britain's transport infrastructure, including Heathrow. I do not intend to go over that ground again, although I want to address the main points raised by the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers). The fact remains—the Conservative party needs to face up to this—that despite her refusal and perhaps inability to answer some very basic questions, she has put forward a policy that lacks coherence, is founded on no clear principles and will do serious damage to Britain's jobs and economy.
	The hon. Lady simply cannot come here and tell Members that the Conservative party would not go ahead with such a major project such as the expansion of Heathrow and fail to set out the basis on which that decision has been reached—without being able to set out the criteria for that decision, her argument has no credibility. As long ago as 2003, the Government set out in a White Paper clear criteria for such expansion. On each issue that she cited as one of the reasons for her decision—air pollution, road congestion, noise and climate change—I asked her, I invited her, I implored her to tell this House and the country the basis on which she has taken any decision, but she could not do it. She has not done any basic homework on the matter, and that leads to the clear conclusion—anybody witnessing the hon. Lady's woeful performance would know that this is the case—that the Conservative party's decision is dictated by political opportunism of the lowest kind. The Conservative party's decision, on which she admitted that she has changed her mind, was determined by Conservative central office. It was not taken on the basis of any kind of principle; it represents the worst kind of expedient. Unless she can answer basic questions on the subject, she has no right to represent her party or the country.

Geoff Hoon: If the hon. Lady is not worried about jobs and the economy —[Interruption.] Well, the position of the Conservative Front-Bench team—I heard some sedentary comments—appears to be that a list of environmental and other organisations will be cited as a reason for not taking a decision on the runway. If that is the policy of the Conservatives, they should articulate it, instead of blustering as the hon. Lady has done.
	Let us consider the impact of the go-ahead decision on jobs and the economy of this country, because hon. Members should not simply take my word for how important this decision is for the country's economic well-being. They should listen to David Frost, of the British Chambers of Commerce, who has said:
	"This sends a strong message to the world that we are a nation open for business."
	Brendan Barber, of the TUC, has said:
	"Aviation is key to the UK economy and will support the creation of many more quality jobs."
	Miles Templeman, of the Institute of Directors, has said:
	"A third runway is vital to maintaining the UK's economic competitiveness, and will put us in a good position to win business from the key markets such as India and China when the upturn comes."
	I am sorry that the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) is not here, because I really wonder what he must think as he looks across his party—a party that was once capable of taking economically serious decisions. He is a man who sat in Conservative Cabinets with Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and who is supposed to speak up for business and jobs inside the Conservative party. He now apparently finds himself, as does the entire Conservative Front-Bench team, at odds with representatives of both employers and employees. It cannot often be said, so let me repeat that the CBI, the TUC, the Institute of Directors and Unite are all on exactly the same side of the argument—they are united in favour of the action necessary to support British jobs and the British economy. That is something that the Conservative party is giving up on.
	No responsible Government can ignore the importance of Heathrow to our international connections, to the 100,000 jobs that it supports directly or indirectly and to the ability of London and the UK's nations and regions to compete for business and commerce. Every great trading nation needs access to the growth markets of the future. Unlike any of the other UK airports, Heathrow serves destinations such as Mumbai and Beijing and it provides more frequent services to key international destinations. In these times of economic slowdown, those links become even more crucial in supporting British jobs and helping to revitalise our economy. What does it say about the Tories' economic policy that they will today turn their backs on 100,000 jobs at Heathrow airport?

John McDonnell: My right hon. Friend mentioned the decision-making process. My constituents are not particularly interested in party political knockabout; we want absolute clarity about the process that will be used to make the decision. I would welcome the opportunity to come back to the matter just to get the clarity. My understanding is that it will be dealt with by the new infrastructure planning commission. If that is the case, it will require a new national policy statement. Will he explain the process of arriving at that new national policy statement given that the aviation White Paper is now six years out of date? If we could get clarity on that today, it would be incredibly helpful.

Geoff Hoon: My hon. Friend makes a fair point. Of course, the process will be governed by the Planning Act 2008, which will set out the process that he has at least in part described. I anticipate that the Government would want to bring forward a new aviation White Paper that would set out the up-to-date position, given the history since 2003. It is important that we acknowledge something that the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet and her colleagues on the Conservative Front Bench seem to have failed to realise—I am sorry that the shadow Chief Whip is not in his place, because he will have to deal with these problems in the unfortunate eventuality if his becoming the Government Chief Whip. The Opposition—I would be delighted to give way again on this point—appeared to suggest that every major planning infrastructure decision would be subject to a vote on the Floor of this House, but that specific provision was rejected in the course of the Planning Bill.
	If every major planning decision were not to be subject to a vote on the Floor of the House, then, once again, I must accuse the Conservative party of political opportunism. It is simply picking out those particular policies on which it thinks it might have some success, rather than being consistent and acknowledging that it is necessary as a governing party to adopt a consistent process governing how decisions are taken.

Geoff Hoon: I have given way to my hon. Friend. I shall give way in a second.
	As the Opposition have accepted that there is a requirement for some increase in capacity, where will that increased capacity be made available? The hon. Member for Chipping Barnet appears to have ruled out any extra capacity at any of the airports in the south in the past. Today, I was not quite so sure what her position would be. Let us consider the policy recommended to the Conservative party by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), whose economic competitiveness policy group was set up and reported in 2007. It was set up, as far as I recall, by the leader of the Conservative party. The report said:
	"The primary issue for UK air transport is the lack of airport capacity to meet the relentless demand...We recommend that an incoming Conservative government's priority should be the strengthening of London's, and Britain's, main air transport hub at Heathrow".
	That was the policy outlined by senior figures in the Conservative party. The policy was articulated as recently as last year by the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts) when he appeared on "Any Questions?" in Hounslow. He said:
	"I'm afraid there is an economic need for more airport capacity somewhere—somewhere in the South East".
	He also said that
	"no responsible party can simply say that we can put up the shutters and there's not going to be any more runways anywhere in the South East".
	That was what was said by a member of the shadow Cabinet, speaking as recently as last year. That is precisely what the Conservative party is trying to do—to put up the shutters and to do nothing. That has been its policy since it changed its position on Heathrow.
	I will give the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet credit—she has acknowledged that the policy has changed. She has acknowledged that the Opposition have changed their mind. What is she is not to tell the House or the country why that policy has changed for any reason other than grubbing after votes in some cheap exercise in political opportunism.

Geoff Hoon: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point and one that was completely ignored by the hon. Lady. At any given time, there can be as many as four stacks of aircraft waiting to land. The average delay at Heathrow—caused by the capacity problems—is some 19 minutes, and some aircraft are delayed for far longer. Therefore it is necessary to address the question of capacity, in carbon terms as much as for any other reason.
	We have been criticised by the hon. Lady for failing to progress longer term options for transport infrastructure, which is why I set out clearly our ambition to ensure the development of a new high-speed line to the north, approaching London via a Heathrow international station on the Great Western line. That could provide a four-way interchange between the airport, the new north-south line, existing Great Western rail services and Crossrail, with a 15-minute service into the centre of London. But I reject the idea that that could somehow be an alternative to much needed runway capacity at Heathrow. The Conservative figures on which the hon. Lady relies assume that every single domestic passenger would transfer to high-speed rail. That would include all passengers flying from the remaining nine British airports served by Heathrow. Incidentally, that includes Belfast. The hon. Lady has failed to explain how a rail link would help our friends in Northern Ireland.
	A great many people simply do not believe the hon. Lady's argument. Richard Lambert of the CBI does not, and he said that
	"a high speed rail link would have a lot going for it, but I don't think for a minute that it will solve the capacity problems at Heathrow."
	The Conservative Mayor of London does not believe it. He said:
	"High speed rail should certainly be part of the mix, but it is not enough on its own."
	Even Conservative Back Benchers do not believe it. Only this week, the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) said:
	"Those who believe new rail links mean fewer flights are wrong."
	The beneficiaries of the Opposition's policy are clear—they would be the Dutch, the French and the Germans. Indeed, on Monday night the director of airport development at Schiphol said on the BBC London news:
	"If I am honest, I must say Heathrow needs a third runway to stay as a major important hub in Europe and to connect London with all the other cities in the world. But for us it would be the best if they wouldn't get the third runway at all."
	Now, despite the reincarnation of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe, I do not believe for a moment that those on the Opposition Front Bench have suddenly seen the light and become overwhelmed by enthusiasm for all things European. What their policy would do, however, is give a real boost to continental employment and growth by exporting British jobs.
	The reality is that, by encouraging our European competitors to expand at our expense, the Opposition's policy would damage us economically without saving a single gram of carbon. The sorry truth is that, in their opportunist drive to secure short-term headlines, the Opposition are sacrificing the country's longer-term interests.

Geoff Hoon: The Liberal Democrat party may be the last party on the planet to notice that we are in the middle of a global economic slowdown. I regret that slowdown and I am very sorry that businesses around the world are having to reduce costs. I know that the Liberal Democrat party is not most economically literate party, but I should have thought that even the hon. Gentleman would have noticed that there are some economic problems out there in the real world—although I know that that is not a world that he inhabits very often.

Robert Key: May we come down to earth for a minute? So far, the Secretary of State has completely failed to talk about the impact of a third runway on any of the local people, but they are not the only ones who would regret the arrival of the bulldozers. He will recall that the construction of terminal 5 took more than a decade, and that it posed a danger to some of the most important archaeological sites in the danger. The Thames gravels will be equally affected by a third runway. It took up to 100 archaeologists working over 10 years to rescue what was left of that great part of Britain's heritage. What plans does he have to rescue Britain's heritage from the wanton destruction caused by the third runway?

Geoff Hoon: The guarantee that I can give is that that can never happen without expansion and more capacity at Heathrow. As I set out, the history of Heathrow since 1990 has been that the number of different destinations served has fallen from 227 to 180, and it is precisely the regional airports that have suffered most. Essentially, what has happened is that, because of the scarcity of slots at Heathrow, airlines have consistently substituted shorter routes for long-distance ones. Therefore, I cannot give the hon. Gentleman the guarantee that he seeks; all I can guarantee is that there will be no change without expansion.
	I turn now to the question of climate change, which various hon. Friends have mentioned. I recognise that Heathrow does not raise only local environmental issues: quite rightly, people also want to understand how the Government's support for a third runway can be reconciled with our climate change commitments.
	As a result of the measures that we have set out, we now have a set of proposals that give the UK the toughest climate change regime for aviation of any country in the world. There will be a new target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from UK aviation in 2050 to below 2005 levels. That provides clear assurance that our strategy for aviation is consistent with our wider climate change goals.
	There will be a limit on the initial use of Heathrow's third runway so that the increase in the annual number of flights is no more than 125,000 a year. That is almost half the additional capacity that we consulted on. In addition, there will be no future capacity increases at Heathrow beyond that figure without Government approval, and following a review by the Committee on Climate Change in 2020 as to whether we are on track to achieve our new aviation carbon dioxide target. The Committee on Climate Change has also been asked to advise on the best basis for measuring that target.
	The Government are also at the forefront of international efforts to include aviation in a global deal on climate change that would build on the UK's leadership in securing the inclusion of aviation in the European Union emissions trading scheme. As a result of the agreement reached by European Ministers last year, aviation will join the ETS in 2012. From that point, net carbon dioxide emissions from aviation in Europe will be capped at 97 per cent. of average 2004-06 levels, with the cap tightening to 95 per cent. from 2013 onwards. Any increase in emissions above those levels would need to be matched by equal reductions in other sectors in the scheme.
	In addition, we are arguing for progressively stricter limits on carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft, similar to those already in place for new cars within the EU. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town (Jim Fitzpatrick), proposed that idea at a G8 meeting very recently and we plan to develop it further with our international partners. That is why I can say with confidence that the United Kingdom will have the toughest climate change regime for aviation of any country in the world.

Geoff Hoon: I set out very clearly the basis of the decision in relation to night flights in the decision that I announced to the House, and I have indicated to the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) that there is no change in that basis.
	The fact remains that this country faces a fundamental choice: we can follow the Conservative party's approach, which would duck the most difficult decisions, slash transport investment in the midst of a downturn, export British jobs and undermine this country's long-term prosperity; or we can help people through the difficult times and take the long-term decisions on investment and climate change that prepare the United Kingdom for the future. For those reasons, I ask my right hon. and hon. Friends to support the Government's amendment to reject the cynical political opportunism that is so manifestly reflected in the motion tabled by the Leader of the Opposition.

John Gummer: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the debate would be more instructive if the Secretary of State had met the issue that most of his colleagues are concerned about, which is the fundamental climate change issue, rather than trying to make odd points against both Opposition parties, which have a principled reason—I could not possibly have a constituency reason—for saying, "If you really care about climate change, you cannot have this extension and expect Ministers to go to Copenhagen with any credibility"?

Norman Baker: I entirely agree with that. The right hon. Gentleman has a long record on this issue. Let me make it absolutely clear that, although we have a number of reasons for objecting to a third runway, our principal reason is climate change. Therefore, the people whom I feel most sorry for are the two who have been corralled on to the Front Bench today: the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. The Cabinet has been leaking like a colander in recent weeks, and we know that those two Secretaries of State have had genuine difficulties—quite rightly, from their perspective, given their Cabinet positions—and that they have been wheeled out today to sit on the Front Bench to give the impression that all has mended and that all is unity.
	I look forward to hearing the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change sum up tonight, when he can tell us how a massive increase in the number of flights, with no technological solutions on the horizon, will contribute to his target of an 80 per cent. cut in carbon emissions. I do not know whether he ever took part in university debates where people have to argue the opposite of what they believe, but he will have to practice that this evening.
	The reality is that this is a very serious issue in climate change terms and for the constituents of those hon. Members who are affected. The House needs to address those two serious issues. I am afraid the Government have got themselves on the wrong side of the argument. The Secretary of State for Transport, who spent his time attacking other people rather than defending his own case, must recognise that there is now overwhelming opposition to the proposed third runway, even in his own party.
	I am happy to say that the Liberal Democrats were the first party in the House to oppose a third runway. In April, we introduced such a motion in the House. We are now being joined by the Conservatives and others: 57 Labour MPs signed the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan). I am glad that the independent spirit has not been entirely extinguished on the Government Benches and that the lure of becoming a Parliamentary Private Secretary has not taken away entirely the need to vote the right way when issues come before the House.
	I draw the House's attention to the article in  The Times that has been referred to, and colleagues in the nationalist parties and in Northern Ireland need to be aware that, far from guaranteeing any extra traffic for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, a third runway at Heathrow
	"could bring expansion at all other airports to a halt."

Norman Baker: I am saying that the Government are muddle-headed and have the wrong policy. The opinion polls should concentrate their minds. If the Government were to concentrate their minds and examine the facts, they would reach a different conclusion.

Norman Baker: The hon. Gentleman is quite right. While we are talking about Gatwick, let me make it absolutely clear that we Liberal Democrat Members are totally opposed to any further expansion of airport capacity in the south-east, and in the term "south-east" I include Gatwick, Stansted and Heathrow.
	The Government waved away the comments of Chris Smith—Lord Smith, who is now chairman of the Environment Agency. He was of course a former Labour party spokesman on the environment, and was well-respected in that capacity. He said on 27 January—not very long ago—that Heathrow expansion is "a mistake"; those are his words. He said that there was "a very big chance" that the project would stall owing to the threat of legal action from campaigners and resistance from Opposition parties. I can confirm that the last part of that point is certainly true. He also said:
	"I think the likelihood is that engines will get cleaner, whether they will get cleaner as rapidly as the government projects I have my doubts."
	He made sensible objections, on behalf of the Environment Agency, to the Government's policy on a third runway. Will the Government formally respond to the Environment Agency, or does that advisory body matter only when it is in line with Government policy, and is it to be discarded and ignored when it is out of line with it? That appears to be the Government's attitude.

Norman Baker: Yes, that is perfectly true, and analysis of travel patterns shows that disproportionate numbers of those who take cheaper flights are middle class or well off, and are not the people referred to in the intervention by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris).
	Let me ask the Secretary of State for Transport to address the issue of safety. I do not wish to say that the proposal for a third runway is unsafe; I just wanted to raise the issue, and be given an assurance at the end of the debate. The Civil Aviation Authority said:
	"Were all...southeastern airport development plans to come to fruition, CAA and NATS are of the view that there would not be sufficient airspace to accommodate the scale of predicted growth"—
	that is, traffic growth—
	"on the basis of current and predicted technology."
	I raised the matter with the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Poplar and Canning Town, last March, as he may recall. He said:
	"The CAA has examined our White Paper proposals and believes that the necessary airspace capacity can be provided safely."—[ Official Report, 4 March 2008; Vol. 472, c. 1589.]
	NATS said, in a letter to me:
	"NATS has not yet carried out detailed work as there has been no requirement for us to do so. We are not therefore able to advise at this stage on any specific airspace changes that may be required in support of any...Government policy to permit expansion of Heathrow."
	It is a serious issue. It may be that expansion can be handled safely; I do not wish to start hares running needlessly, but it is important that it be put on the record that any expansion at Heathrow can be handled safely under the current air traffic regime. I shall be grateful for such an assurance from the Minister when he replies.

Norman Baker: That is perfectly true. The issue is not simply about getting to other cities in the UK—this may partly relate to the Belfast point; it is also about getting to other cities in near Europe. The potential for high-speed traffic to take us to Amsterdam and other towns and cities in near Europe is significant. The Government have not given that point full weight. There are still too many short-haul flights. There are 24 flights today from London to Manchester; I checked this morning. There is no need for flight from London to Manchester. Paris-Brussels flights have effectively been eliminated by a good rail link. There is considerable potential for transfer of traffic from air to rail. There are still a large number of flights to Paris, although Eurostar offers a good service.
	Why is there such a rush to get the third runway approved? It is partly because BAA and its friends know that if there is a change of Government at the next election, whatever the outcome—no matter whether there is a Conservative majority or a hung Parliament—it is much less likely that Heathrow expansion will be progressed with. By the way, I tell civil servants in the Department for Transport not to waste their time on working out an aviation statement; they will not need it. It will be rewritten after the next election.
	The majority shareholder in the Department for Transport, BAA, is keen that we should move forward with the expansion as soon as possible. It knows that high-speed rail is a real alternative. It knows that in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, there has been a massive transfer from air to rail on key corridors. It knows that that will happen in this country, too, and that is why it is so desperate to get permission for the third runway before high-speed rail kicks in and the whole case vanishes from under its feet. That is what the game is about, and that is why it is so determined to push the change through. It is just a pity that the Government are determined to aid it in that proposal. It is a great shame.

Simon Hughes: I remind my hon. Friend and the House that there is, at last, progress on Crossrail, which will produce jobs and better train services, and progress on Thameslink, which presents some constituency problems for me but is a welcome north-south rail link, there is an East London line extension, there are plans for a cross-river tram, and there are further plans for light rail. There are many transport schemes that will add to carbon-efficient, non-harmful transport in and around London and provide many jobs in the process.

Norman Baker: The right hon. Gentleman is right. He may have seen a recent study that came out in the past few days and confirmed that. It said that it was not only economically sensible but environmentally sensible to try and do much more business by, for example, video link. It is often unnecessary to fly around the world to do business and it is inefficient to do so—except for Government Ministers, who like to travel round the world frequently.
	The economic case has been overstated. It does not take into account the huge subsidy that aviation gets from the fact that it pays no tax on its fuel, unlike other modes of transport. Lastly on the economic point, I draw attention to a poll carried out in December 2008 covering 500 businesses, not the one or two referred to by the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening). Only 4 per cent. believed that they would benefit from an expanded Heathrow, whereas 95 per cent. said that that would make little or no difference. However, 23 per cent. of businesses thought they would be helped by a new high-speed rail line to the north. When asked which one they would choose, 27 per cent. chose the rail link and only 4 per cent. chose Heathrow. That is the voice of business.
	Political support is vanishing from under the Minister's feet, as is business support. We are told that the Heathrow expansion will help tourism. Foreign visitors arriving by air in 2004 spent £11 billion in this country, but UK citizens going abroad that year spent £26 billion, so if we increase Heathrow's capacity, there is also an issue about whether we should allow more money to flow out of the country and suck less in. That seems not to have been factored in. I do not know whether the British Tourist Authority is in favour of a third runway at Heathrow. I would have thought that it was rather dodgy, if I were considering the future of tourism in this country.
	I am conscious of the time that I am taking. I have not mentioned local factors, which are very important. I remember powerfully the intervention and comments of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) the last time we debated the matter. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) has a close constituency interest. I hope she will catch the Deputy Speaker's eye and be able to speak on those matters. Seven hundred homes demolished, 1,600 people evicted, and Sipson wiped off the map is not something that the House of Commons should be proud of.
	We must ask ourselves the reasons for the Government's policy. It is electorally unpopular, economically it does not make sense and it is environmentally damaging, so what is the policy for? The Department for Transport seems to have been influenced far too much in recent times by BAA, which seems to decide what the Government's aviation policy is. Let us not forget that BAA half-wrote the consultation, set up a joint body, the Heathrow Delivery Group, to steer the plans through the consultation process, and provided the data for calculations of noise and pollution that formed the premises of the consultation document. Opposition groups were not permitted to challenge the data. The Department for Transport and BAA set up a risk list, a list of threats to the building of the third runway, which includes the 2M campaign representing 2 million people.
	I will not bore the House by elaborating on the revolving door, but there are a huge number of people in government who find themselves connected with BAA, and a huge number of people connected with BAA who find themselves rather close to Government. That explains why the Government have got their position completely wrong on the matter.
	I appeal to the House today to leave aside the charge of political opportunism. Whether hon. Members believe that or not, it is not relevant. What is relevant is that the Government have studiously avoided giving the House of Commons the opportunity of a vote on Heathrow, which is a disgrace.
	We on the two Opposition Front Benches have done the best we can to try to make sure that there is a vote in the House. It is the only vote that we are likely to get before the next general election, so I ask Labour MPs to think very carefully about how they will vote this evening. If they go through the Lobby with the Government, which is the easy way of dealing with the matter, the way of least resistance, they will have to answer to their consciences. They will have to answer for the inconsistencies with the Climate Change Act 2008, and they will have to answer mostly to their constituents if they happen to live anywhere near London or the flight path.
	This is the one opportunity that we all have to get it right. I ask Labour Members to think about the environmental impact of a third runway, and about the local impact. If they cannot do that, I ask them to think about their own political prospects. If they think of those three things, they will vote to reject a third runway at Heathrow. It does not really matter what the Government do; I think the third runway is dead in the water and it will not go ahead.

Alan Keen: Just a few moments ago, an Opposition Member mentioned the bar on increases in night flights until 2012. That was the first concession that any Government had ever given on Heathrow airport—the first time they had ever opposed anything that British Airways or BAA wanted. My hon., and special, Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ann Keen) and I met the Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Secretary of State for Transport, and he agreed not to oppose the House of Lords amendment on the expansion of night flights. He agreed to allow the amendment to come through. People were delighted. That was the first concession ever made by any Government against BAA's wishes. That is not a mammoth example, but it was the first one, and a good sign.
	The barring of mixed mode will make a tremendous difference.  [Interruption.] People are pulling faces again, but they cannot have felt the relief that I felt. My constituents live very close to Heathrow—right up to the fence—and the noise is appalling. They have had put up with that noise for many years. We are now arguing about the third runway, which I opposed, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington. However, mixed mode would affect my constituents; runway No. 3 would bring a little more surface transport.
	At no meeting that I have attended to plead for a bar on mixed mode have I ever done anything other than say at the outset that I supported my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington and his constituents in protesting against runway No. 3. However, that runway will hardly affect my constituents at all. The barring of mixed mode will not only save people who would not have been able to use their own gardens with any pleasure ever again; it will also prevent the damage to education in schools in my constituency. Knowing on which days the noise will start at 3 pm and on which days there will be noise until 3 pm makes a tremendous difference. As Opposition Members know, their motion is party politicking. That is why I shall vote against it, despite my opposition to expansion outside the current boundaries.

Stewart Jackson: I am following the right hon. Lady's remarks closely. Is not the logical position of her own Government that if a third runway is built, and if they are serious about reducing carbon emissions, that means that the development of regional airports will be stymied or indeed stopped in its tracks, with implications across the whole United Kingdom for regeneration and employment in those areas, including our own area of Greater Manchester?

Nick Raynsford: The debate has been curious. I do not support the expansion of Heathrow, but I was disappointed in the speech of the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers), which failed to rise to the occasion and showed that the Opposition still face a steep learning curve on aviation and transport policy.
	I applaud Labour Front Benchers' efforts to mitigate the consequences of Heathrow expansion. I applaud their efforts to set limits and restrictions, especially focusing on climate change concerns, to try to square the circle of environmental objectives and the interests of the economy and aviation. However, I do not believe that their position is tenable long term. The location of Heathrow means an inherent conflict between quality of life and environmental objectives, about which many hon. Members feel deeply, and the interests of the economy and aviation. I fully endorse the Secretary of State's view that we cannot sacrifice the latter without losing competitiveness to other countries. We must address the issue of how we can provide some additional capacity for aviation—which I believe is necessary—in a genuinely sustainable way.
	I listened with great care to the admirable speech that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, West (Ruth Kelly) made. She focused in a very intelligent way on the importance of international measures, particularly the introduction of a system of carbon trading that could be applied to aviation in order to achieve the necessary effect. That is part of the answer, but it cannot address the other tensions that are inherent at Heathrow, including the problem of its location in the middle of a densely populated area of west London in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people live under the flight paths and are subjected to intolerable noise pressures.
	Nor can such a measure deal with the problem of a highly congested road network that is responsible for many of the air quality problems that the Government are trying to address. However effectively we reduce the emissions from aircraft, the emissions from motor traffic around Heathrow will remain a crucial constraint. Furthermore, as one or two hon. Members have said, there remains the separate but equally important issue of the impact on the people of Sipson and the surrounding areas, whose homes will be demolished to make way for this expansion. I do not believe that it is tenable to set that aside and not treat it as a serious issue.
	The question ultimately must be whether Heathrow is the only site on which we can achieve the maintenance of a hub airport capacity—which I believe is necessary and important to our economy—while meeting our environmental objectives. The answer is that I do not believe that Heathrow holds out that possibility, and that we have to look at the alternatives.
	Last Friday, I had the good fortune to travel to the Thames estuary, in the company of the Mayor of London and Douglas Oakervee, to explore a site that is the focus of a study being undertaken by Doug Oakervee into the feasibility of an estuary airport. In absolutely filthy weather conditions, we embarked on a barge from Sheerness and travelled to an extremely remote site some eight miles out into the estuary. It was the site not of a wind farm but of a world war two anti-aircraft battery that had been placed there to defend London from a different type of aviation in the 1940s. Interestingly, it is still there today.
	We could not have been given a clearer message that the site should be considered for an airport, if that were feasible. It is several miles from either shore, and therefore very remote. Also, aircraft would be able to take off and land over water, which would avoid the degree of conflict that is caused by noise problems in surrounding communities. That would give it a huge advantage over Heathrow. Furthermore, the river is relatively shallow at that point. The very fact that anti-aircraft batteries could be located there is living proof of that.
	As I said in an intervention on the Secretary of State earlier, Doug Oakervee was the chief engineer and project director responsible for the Hong Kong airport, and he is now the chairman of Crossrail. He is an extremely distinguished engineer, and he made it quite clear that, in engineering terms, it was a feasible option. He also believes that it would probably be feasible financially. It would be very expensive—no question—particularly because of the need for all the ancillary infrastructure, including the high-speed rail links and other links, necessary to make it work.

John Gummer: I speak as someone who has changed his mind on Heathrow. I have done so because, although I understand the importance of the competitiveness of British industry, I am convinced that if we go ahead with the proposal, it will make it impossible to meet reasonable climate change requirements. That is why I want to address the issue in a rather more measured way than that of the Secretary of State.
	I have no wish to claim any constituency interest in Heathrow, except to say that it will be better for my constituency if Heathrow is expanded, because it will make it less likely that Stansted will be expanded. I am not biased in that sense. We must take the problem seriously and ask how we deal with it in a way that meets the requirements of the Climate Change Bill and climate change demands. We cannot turn round and say that there is a balance and that we are going down on this or that side of it. I say that there is no balance: we have to meet the demands of dealing with climate change, so there is a need for an alternative policy to achieve that. I wish I could go along with the argument for Heathrow, but when one looks at the facts and figures, I do not think that they stack up.
	It has been suggested by the former Secretary of State for Transport, the right hon. Member for Bolton, West (Ruth Kelly), that everything will be all right because of the European emissions trading system. I am a fan of that system, but there is no way that the price of those certificates will outweigh some of the economic incentives for unnecessary airline flights. It will not happen; the figures quite clearly prove it.
	It just happens to be economically advantageous to fly flights to Manchester, even though that is not a sensible thing to do, particularly if we replace the present railway line with a much faster alternative. The truth is that the flights going to Manchester show just how wrong it is to argue that there is somehow a scarcity of slots. The truth is that if we did not have the unnecessary flights, we would have the slots to the north of Ireland that are necessary, if that is the argument. The first thing we need to do, then, is to get rid of the flights that are not necessary and replace them with such additional air transport as may be needed.
	There is also the argument about stacking. One can deal with stacking very simply and remove 11 per cent. of emissions by having a sensible European-wide air traffic control instead of the present divided system. That would mean planes would not take off from Madrid unless there was point at which they could land. That is a sensible way forward.
	I am not going to argue the geographical case against Heathrow, as that is for others to do. In any case, I am in favour of replacing Heathrow for such air traffic as we need—a considerable amount—with a new airport, simply because the Hudson river example demonstrates the exact opposite of what the Secretary of State has suggested. The fact is that it shows just how dangerous it is to fly large numbers of flights over extremely densely populated areas. That also leads me on to say that to rely on arguments in the aviation White Paper of 2003 when we have moved on so far in climate change terms shows how difficult it is to resolve the problem.
	There are four things that I want to put to Ministers. First, it is very difficult to take the Government's assurances on a number of these issues seriously when the Environment Agency—the Government's own agency—which has not shown itself previously to be enthusiastically opposed on these issues, tells us that the Heathrow expansion should not go ahead.
	Secondly, I must request that we should not ask for a derogation from EU rules on low-level emissions because if we go ahead with that, it makes the whole argument about credibility very difficult to defend. The Government need to tell us that we are going to meet the EU requirements, not have a derogation and show that we can achieve what we say in a manner that any environmentally supportive Government would do.
	Those are local issues about the local environment, but the biggest issue of all comes back to the question of climate change. Here I want to address the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in particular. Britain needs to lead Europe and Europe needs to lead the world on this issue. President Obama represents a remarkable and wonderful change, but he will have his own internal difficulties, which will build up as the honeymoon period inevitably diminishes, so we have to put ourselves into the strongest possible position.
	I know that the Secretary of State feels that he has gained enough in this whole argument to put forward the case that we can both lead on climate change and have a third runway at London airport. I put it to him that that will not be possible, because at some point we have to draw the line and say that we cannot go on with the expansion of aviation at its current rate as well as realistically meet our climate change targets without putting so heavy a burden on the rest of industry that it will lose the very jobs that Heathrow is supposed to provide.

Rob Marris: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the official Opposition's motion partly contradicts the position that he has consistently put forward on climate change? The motion calls for an exploration of
	"the potential of other UK airports to handle more long-haul flights".
	Will not that contradiction within the motion present a dilemma for the right hon. Gentleman?

John Gummer: The difficulty is that the Government would not allow the vote in Government time that we should have had, so the Opposition's only opportunity to present the case as impartially as they can is to take the words of a Cross Bencher's motion. I have to say to the hon. Gentleman, who I know rather agrees with me on this issue, that it is perfectly proper in a democratic framework for the Opposition to ask the Government for a proper vote. I shall say more about that before I finish, but let me return to climate change.
	I believe that if we do not embark down the road of restricting the growth of aviation, the weight on the rest of British industry that will result from trying to meet our climate change requirements will be far too great. How do we restrict the growth of aviation without restricting our ability to trade and to take leisure? The answer, of course, is high-speed rail. What worries me—I am sure that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change can be exempted from this criticism—is that we heard nothing about high-speed rail proposals from the Government until they became the official policy of the Opposition. I happen to know this to be true, as the Government would be prepared to bring forward high-speed rail proposals now in order to overcome the downturn—they are looking for ways of dealing with it. Why can they not bring such proposals forward? Because the right hon. Member for Bolton, West did not do the work on them. That serious criticism can be levelled at previous Ministers.

John Gummer: A commitment to investigate by a Government who have had more taskforce investigations, commissions and the like is a meaningless commitment, and we all know it. The truth of the matter is that there was no intention at all to push this forward until it was seen that this was a realistic and reasonable alternative, and that we could make the present Heathrow work better by having a hub there, along the lines of the Ove Arup suggestion.
	So there is an alternative, and it is one that delivers for both the needs of British industry and for our climate change policy. I should point out in British industry's defence that more and more businesses are seeing that we travel much more than we need to, and we will come out of this downturn with many more people taking seriously this part of their commitment to sustainability. So I find it difficult to argue at this moment that we need to have the particular answer that has been put forward.
	I do not believe that we can meet this requirement in this curious, two-handed way—a new runway, and our support for the Committee on Climate Change—above all because someone has to say "stop". The European Union is not going to carry forward a policy in which we restrict airport expansion in Europe as a whole as part of its climate change programme if the country that puts it forward is the one that has just done the last development. That is precisely the way to make nobody follow us. That is why we have to take what is the brave step of being the leader on this.
	I know that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has a difficult role to play here. Instinctively, he knows what a difficult balance it is. He has come down on one side, after a great deal of argument, and I do respect him in this because at least he believes in climate change. I have to say that, to judge from the speeches of the Secretary of State for Transport, I am beginning to wonder whether he really has that commitment to the belief that climate change is happening. He does not really take it seriously—at least, that seriousness has not come through in his speeches. Perhaps a little tutoring over the years will make him better at feigning, at least, some sort of enthusiasm.
	I want to make the time spent by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in Copenhagen the most productive it could be. I want to make him the man who made the difference in the European Union, and the EU the body that made the difference to save this world from the effects of climate change. This issue hampers him—it makes it almost impossible to take this Government seriously, and because I believe that climate change is the biggest physical threat to the world, I believe that we should not have a third runway.

David Taylor: My hon. Friend is referring to early-day motion 2344, which was tabled in the last Session. There is no doubt that it is a bipartisan motion, but does my hon. Friend not realise that some of those 57 or 58 will not be in the Lobby with us tonight—for I plan to be in the same Lobby as my hon. Friend—because of the charge of political opportunism?
	When the Conservatives were last in power pre 1997, they were even closer to the aviation industry than the present Government are. They were in bed with the industry, and refused to implement reasonable and decent environmental frameworks at airports such as East Midlands airport in my constituency, which has more night flights than Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick put together. Their track record—

Michael Meacher: I agree. It is easy to make commitments for five years' time, but those for 50 years' time are not very serious, unless there is evidence in the short term that we are systematically making progress towards them.
	The whole thrust of the Government's case in the statement made on 15 January is that whatever the environmental downsides—and the Secretary of State did acknowledge those—the economic case for expansion was overriding. We are told that the third runway is essential for the business economy and Britain's future competitiveness. That case has been far too widely taken at face value, and it needs far more scrutiny.
	First of all, the aviation industry ranks only 26th in this country; it is half the size of the computer industry. Far from aviation being key to the balance of payments, as the airline industry constantly likes to argue—of course using only one side of the equation: the expenditure of incoming travellers to the UK—both sides of the equation show a deficit of £17 billion a year. That is the amount by which what British tourists spend abroad exceeds what incoming foreign tourists spend here.
	The UK airline industry is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer: £10 billion is spent a year, roughly, on VAT-free tickets and planes and tax-free fuel. That is taxpayers' money that could be far better spent on sustainable transport systems, and particularly on substitutes for domestic short-haul flights. Indeed, the respected industrial consultants that I have quoted before, CE Delft, argued that the official figures greatly exaggerate both the number of jobs that the runway would generate and the value brought to Britain by extra business travellers.
	In addition, in a video-conferencing age—to take on the point made by the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) about business practices changing in the economic downturn—the number of business flights that are absolutely essential to the British economy are, I suspect, comparatively few. No less than 87 per cent. of international passengers are in the leisure and tourism category, and even at Heathrow only a third of travellers are travelling on business. I suspect that much even of that travel is probably perks—a conference or a holiday on expenses.
	The hub argument that is repeatedly used, and is so beloved of the industry, is not any more persuasive. Indeed, Bob Ayling, the former BA chief executive, recently said that transfer passengers spend little or no money in London and offer no external benefits, except to airline profits. The biggest growth in air travel has actually been in non-hub cheap flights, as we know.
	There is also the argument about capacity constraint, but the industry does not actually believe that. Table C1 on page 205 of the recent Department for Transport Heathrow consultation document, which by chance I have with me, shows BAA's forecast for Heathrow, with the 480,000 maximum movement limit still in place for the period between 2000 and 2030. BAA sees a growth from 67 million passengers in 2006 to 85 million in 2015 and 95 million by 2030—a 30 per cent. increase. Why is there a capacity constraint? Why will that increase happen? The movement limit will rightly force airlines to fly larger and larger aircraft per flight, increasing passenger numbers per movement. That clearly shows that even the industry does not anticipate that Heathrow is in any sense in decline. The industry has a very optimistic forecast, even under the current capacity-controlled regime.
	There is also the argument that Schiphol and Charles de Gaulle have more runways than Heathrow, which of course they do. For competitiveness reasons, it is argued, Heathrow must be allowed to expand. However, that misrepresents the configuration of airports in Britain. In south-east England we have not one airport but five—Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City—each catering for a different sector of the air transport market place. The south-east transport system as a whole—that is the only way of regarding it—will always collectively offer more choices of flights to more destinations at a greater range of prices and times, with greater convenience and with more airlines, than Charles de Gaulle and Schiphol put together. Added together, London's airports handle 137 million passengers a year. That number is set to grow within current planning limits to about 210 million passengers by 2030. In comparison, Charles de Gaulle airport handles 59 million passengers, Frankfurt 54 million, Madrid 52 million and Schiphol just 46 million. So Heathrow's so-called continental competitors lag a long way behind, and they will continue to do so as our five-airport system develops.
	The business case for the third runway at Heathrow is clearly much weaker than has been made out, and I have to say that what does not fit it has been massaged. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the treatment of the noise, air pollution and climate change impacts of the proposed Heathrow expansion.
	Last March  The Sunday Times published devastating evidence that the Department for Transport and BAA knew perfectly well even then—and, in fact, a long time before that—that a third runway at Heathrow would immediately breach mandatory EU noise and pollution limits, especially on nitrogen oxide. That would mean that it could never be built, and they therefore colluded in re-engineering the figures to fit the limits.
	In his statement a fortnight ago, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said:
	"Immediately around Heathrow, action will be necessary to ensure that we meet the air quality limits by 2015. Our forecasts predict that, in any event, we will be meeting the limits by 2020 even with airport expansion."—[ Official Report, 15 January 2009; Vol. 486, c. 358.]
	On the latter point, it is not good enough to say that the EU mandatory limits will be met by 2020, because they kick in on 1 January 2015. On the former point, I hope that my right hon. Friend will understand me when I say—slightly delicately—that it is all very well to be assured that action will be necessary to meet the targets by 2020, but that commitments have been given and broken repeatedly by successive Governments. We need to be told transparently exactly what mechanisms will bring the UK into compliance with the EU limits, because it is very difficult to place much credibility in vague promises.
	The fact is that we are already well over the permitted EU nitrogen oxide levels around Heathrow. The problem will be worse by 2015, and worse still by 2020. Therefore, I ask again: what precisely are the mechanisms that will ensure that we meet the limits that the EU will force on us? If the Secretary of State cannot tell the House precisely what they are, I do not see how he can responsibly approve the expansion of Heathrow, nor how this House can responsibly vote in support of that proposal.
	For all the reasons that I have set out, and although I understand what others have said, I regret to say that I support the motion and intend to vote for it tonight.

John McDonnell: I was not completely sure how to attract your attention, Madam Deputy Speaker.  [Laughter.]
	For some of my constituents, last week's statement was heartbreaking. Most of them, faced with the loss of their homes, schools, places of worship and whole community, found it devastating. For most of them, it brought about a stronger sense of community, and absolute determination to fight on to ensure that this disastrous proposal does not go ahead.
	My forced absence from Parliament over the past week meant that I held a number of meetings across the constituency, and the Mayor of London held his question time there, too. As a result, I spoke to more than 1,000 constituents that week. The message that they want me to convey to the House, and to the Government, is: "We will not be moved. We will not allow this to happen. We will not allow our communities to be bulldozed in this way."
	I heard the Secretary of State say that he has "carefully weighed" the interests of local people. My constituents and those of the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) and other local MPs would be more convinced of that if, over the past decade, a single Secretary of State had come to our area to meet local residents. Ministers have been to the area plenty of times to meet the aviation businesses, but not one Secretary of State at any invitation has come and met the local people. I find that appalling. I issue the invitation again today, not to meet hand-picked delegations of one or two, but to come and meet the people whose homes they are threatening to demolish.
	I do not expect Members to know every detail of the decision. That is not the way of things. No one can know everything about every debate and every decision, but because it affects the lives of so many people, I expect Members to look at some of the information available to us. I have pored over the published documents associated with last week's statement. They are voluminous, but it is worth time and attention to study them. When the Government make the decision, we need to know what the economic arguments are, the implications for local communities, the environmental impact and what people feel about it.
	I jotted down some of the arguments that we have heard today. My right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher) set out the alternative economic case. Heathrow is not failing. It is expanding. There will be another 30 million passengers in the coming planning period. The argument that it is failing as an aviation resource is laughable when one considers the intensity of the development that is taking place and the number of passengers that we are moving.
	Comparison has been made with our international competitors. We are moving across London and the south-east nearly three times the number of passengers that other capital cities are moving. Reference was made to a hub. It was pointed out that we have five airports, or six, including Northolt. Each one is providing a specialist service for the area. What we need to do now is connect them so that they become a collective hub, allowing people to fly into London through any airport and to fly wherever they want.
	That is the future for aviation in this country. The reason that it has not happened—let us be honest about it—is the strength of lobbying by BAA and BA, self-interestedly trying to develop solely Heathrow as their own airport to maximise the profits from BAA's ownership of Gatwick and Heathrow. We need to cut through that self-interested lobbying and develop the future of aviation in this country, so that it will be sustainable and have a collective, co-ordinated hub linked by high-speed rail.
	Members need to read the documentation about the social impacts of the development. We know about the 700 houses in Sipson because that is in the documentation, but there is no mention of Harmondsworth, Harlington, Cranford, South Hayes and all the rest. It is like Brigadoon. It is almost as though they had disappeared off the face of the earth.
	When Sir John Egan, the chief executive of BAA, wrote to my constituents at the time of the building of the fifth terminal, he said that BAA would not go for a third runway because of the destruction of 3,300 homes. There are now 4,000 homes in that area, which means that people in Harmondsworth, Harlington, Cranford Cross and Longford—this is particularly so as a result of the scrapping of the Cranford agreement—will live in homes that will eventually be bulldozed or in areas where they are breathing poisoned air and which have been rendered unliveable by noise and air pollution.
	The House, without a vote, is determining the forced movement of 10,000 people. Let us recognise that. It is not mentioned in the documentation. It is not just a matter of 700 homes. At one of my meetings, one of the people from Sipson got up and said, "We're the lucky ones. Others face the lingering death of their communities around the area."
	The health implications for my constituents and others have been mentioned. We have been asking for a health impact assessment around the airport for almost 15 years. I took evidence to the terminal 5 inquiry about the respiratory conditions in our area. We did a survey. We asked the Government to make a health impact assessment before they made any decision, but none was forthcoming. My local primary care trust has just written to the Secretary of State saying that it would carry out the assessment but that it needed the necessary funding. How can we go forward with a decision such as this without even assessing the health consequences for my community?
	The economic arguments in the document are almost laughable. I say to hon. Members from other parts of the country that the costs are unsustainable. Grupo Ferrovial, the Spanish company involved, will pay for the building of the runway and the terminal itself, but we taxpayers will pay all the ancillary costs. For the next decade, that will squeeze out of this country's transport budget any potential for transport improvements across the country. Basically, we are committing taxpayers' resources to subsidise the profits of a Spanish company that has just taken over the British Airports Authority for speculative gain.
	Let me go back to the conditions. It has been said time and again in the House that the conditions will not stick. There is almost consensus on it; no one believes that they will do so. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) asked what single commitment BAA had given that it had adhered to, or that any Government had adhered to. We are told that the conditions will be legally binding, but we have been here so many times before.
	I am grateful for the lobbying done by some Secretaries of State in Cabinet, but to be frank, some of the commitments and conditions imposed do not stack up. The argument that there will be green slots on the runway, for aeroplanes that do not yet even exist, is farcical. People should look at some of the statistics in the paperwork published last week. There is even one analysis that says that in 2002 more than 7,500 homes were located in areas suffering from air pollution above the European Union limits, and that in 2015 there will be none. How will that miracle be brought about—on the basis of the assessment provided by BAA about non-polluting, non-noise making aeroplanes that will run off the new runway that will be developed by the company itself for profits? Nobody is given credible reassurances.
	I turn to the process itself. I am still unclear about how the decision will be made. We were assured that if there was to be a national policy statement in advance of the decision, it would be consulted on and there would be parliamentary approval in some form. I want that commitment today. I want there to be a vote in the House. The hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) quoted back to the Prime Minister something that he said when people were on the roof of the Chamber; I almost got the blame for that one as well. The Prime Minister said that the decision would be made not on the roof, but in this Chamber. I expect him to adhere to that commitment.
	I expect any national policy statement that will inform the planning and infrastructure commission to be debated and decided on the Floor of the House. What is wrong with debating infrastructure projects here? We have just spent the past two years debating Crossrail, which will have a major impact. Actually, I opposed that project in the early '90s, but as a result of the debate on the legislation we have improved it and as a result of democratic discussion and a vote in the House, there was consensus across all political parties. Why can that not happen on the most significant aviation infrastructure project in a generation, which at this rate will be decided by the Government?
	Finally, I find it unseemly how lobbyists have been able to permeate Government decision making on this issue. There has been exposure of a revolving door of lobbyists, and a Member of the House of Lords is paid full time to lobby on the issue on behalf of the aviation industry. The measure will not be credible without a vote of this House.

Nick Hurd: It is a privilege to follow two speeches by my senior and southern Hillingdon neighbours. They made great speeches on behalf of their communities.
	I should like to salute two brave speeches in this debate. The first was that of my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State for Transport, who had the courage to go to the Dispatch Box and say that she had thought things through a little harder and come to a different view. She was met with derision from the opposing Benches, where a lot more people should have done exactly the same thing. I salute my hon. Friend. The other brave speech was from the hon. Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter), who is not in his place, so I will not shower him with praise. He appears, for today at least, to have overcome a lifelong loathing of the Conservative party so as to do the right thing. Those were brave speeches.
	The least courageous speech this afternoon came from the Secretary of State. He came here with a stinker of a speech on 11 November, and he has followed it with an even worse one today. He did not even have the courage to make a case to the House for his decision. I wish that he had been in the Beck theatre in the constituency of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) at a public debate facilitated by Boris Johnson. An empty chair was left up on the stage for a member of the Government to participate, but no one appeared. We had a fantastic debate. If he had turned up, he would have heard, as one would expect, genuine anger from local people whose houses are going to be demolished and who are going to have to dig up their relatives in the cemetery. He might then have come to the House in more sensitive mode. He should have been particularly concerned about the expression of a complete breakdown of public trust in how this process has been conducted and in the democratic process of decision making in this country.
	The public have lost faith. They know what has happened in this process. They know that there has been a steady stream of broken promises or lies by BAA, and they can see a Government who have got far too close to that organisation. The Secretary of State's speech included lots of new announcements on additions to rail capacity in the Heathrow area that were not part of the original consultation process, which is now invalidated. People see a really bad decision-making process and ask why we are doing this, because they can see the facts. They can see that this decision will materially affect the quality of life of millions of people in west London living under the flight path. They can see that it will destroy communities, and they care about that. They can see that it will increase emissions. A lot of people care passionately about that and do not understand why a Government who take pride in leadership in this area are driving a coach and horses through their own climate change strategy with this one decision. They can see the impact on air quality in the Thames valley. They can see all these things, and they ask why we are doing it. The answer from the Government is no more than a series of assertions—that Heathrow is full, that the concept of the hub is a sacred cow that cannot be questioned, that it is inevitable that Heathrow will decline and that that carries mortal consequences for the state of the British economy, and that we therefore have to take this enormous decision in the national interest.
	What is shocking is the lack of rigour in testing those assertions. As the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher) powerfully observed, how can Heathrow be full when the Government and the Department accept the data in BAA's own consultation document about an enormous increase in passenger flows through Heathrow over the next 20 years because the market will respond to capacity constraint by flying bigger planes? Those are not the statistics of an airport in decline, so why is decline considered inevitable? Heathrow has not declined over the past 10 years. While other airports have expanded, has London suffered any loss of prosperity? No, because decisions on where people invest and do business are not restricted to the quality of the airport. Everyone knows that Heathrow is shockingly bad as a passenger experience, but people still come and do business here. A host of other factors determine business decisions. What I hear from business people is not, "I can't get to place A from Heathrow", but "This is a shockingly bad experience, and what are you going to do about it?" They want a better Heathrow, not a bigger Heathrow.
	As other speakers have said, we have enormous airport capacity around London. London has five airports. We move many more people than our so-called European competitors. We have the best connections in Europe, and that will be the case for the foreseeable future. The Government talk sombrely about the decline of the hub model, but where is the modelling to support that assertion? Where are the data? Where is the research? Where is anything on which we can pin evidence to test this assertion? There is nothing—just really lazy decision making by a Government who were content merely to jointly commission with the industry research that underpins a business case that has been exposed over time to be entirely inadequate.
	Where is the debate about the future of the hub as the sacred cow of the industry? Is it conceivable that consumers might want a different experience in future, and that they might want fly direct to places? They might not want to spend hours wandering around huge, impersonal airports. The consumer and the industry might change, but we are nailing our colours to the mast and signing up to BAA's game of "My airport is bigger than your airport."
	That seems to be the limit of the Government's vision, but will not our European competitors be subject to exactly the same constraints as we are in a carbon-constrained world? As my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) said, now is exactly the time to show genuine leadership in Europe and to say that this game is unsustainable. We should take a lead in saying, "Pause and rethink." Have the Government engaged with those matters at all? No. There has been absolute silence, and they have bought the BAA argument hook, line and sinker.
	The truth is that for the foreseeable future, London will have the best air connections in the world. Surely the trick is now to think much more cleverly about what will change in the future and, as the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said, to consider how we can connect the five London airports more effectively. We must consider the 25 or 30 per cent. of Heathrow's capacity that could be served by rail and give passengers a genuinely compelling alternative. We must consider how to harness the new technology that is coming on stream to give people a better alternative to flying, or to accelerate the industry's progress in finding more environmentally friendly methods. Those are the big policy questions, and we should not adopt a passive, predict-and-provide approach in tame submission to an extremely effective corporate lobby.
	Now is the time for real leadership. I will be interested to hear what the new Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has to say. I simply cannot see how a third runway at Heathrow is compatible with achieving an 80 per cent. emissions cut by 2050. He has placed only one policy chip on the table, which is emissions trading, despite the fact that it has been proven only as a concept and a theory. It has not been proven in practice to reduce emissions, because cap and trade schemes are only as good as the cap that is set, and caps are set by politicians who, as we well know, are subject to intense corporate lobbying to make them as soft as possible. The caps that he has set up are no more than aspirations, and the debate has only just started. We have no guarantee at all that they will be effective in reducing emissions on a scale compatible with our target of an 80 per cent. drop by 2050.
	A really big Government, a Government who genuinely took the tough decisions, would say, "We may have got this wrong. We have listened to the people who share our concerns about climate change—the Environment Agency, the millions of residents, the businesses that are thoughtful about the matter—and we recognise that we may have got this wrong." This Government will not do that, because they are not that sort of Government. The matter will therefore be decided at the next general election.
	It is perhaps worth my ending by echoing the voices of two of my constituents. One of them wrote to the Prime Minister, and is a Labour supporter—some still exist in Northwood, the Secretary of State will be encouraged to hear. He wrote:
	"If the government is serious about lowering the UK's emissions why is this proposal even being considered?...There's no denying that Heathrow is an important airport for the UK but I do urge you to look again at the planned expansion proposals from a humanitarian (traditionally Labour) perspective and ask again whether the UK can live without this expansion. I and many other Labour supporters believe it can."
	Another constituent wrote to me:
	"I trust that when the Conservatives win the next election the Conservative Government will rescind this awful decision and bury this scheme forever. Perhaps I will then start to believe again that I am still living in a democracy."

Chris Mullin: I believe that I am right in saying that so far this afternoon, no Member of any party, apart from the Secretary of State, has spoken in favour of the expansion.  [Interruption.] I beg your pardon; there was also a former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, West (Ruth Kelly). She has the privilege of the being the only Member who has spoken from the Back Benches in favour of a bigger Heathrow.
	My view is the same as that of most Members who have spoken—that, as the hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) said, the expansion drives a coach and horses through the Government's emissions policy, and that it is a mistake. I welcome the decision by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to resist the demand for mixed mode, but giving the go-ahead for a new runway is a surrender to one of the mightiest lobbies in the UK, which has plans, if it is unconstrained, for unlimited expansion, regardless of environmental or any other factors.

Greg Hands: As I said in our last debate on Heathrow in November, I have always considered myself a pragmatist on this issue. I try to look at the net environmental benefits or disbenefits of any proposed changes, and, alongside that, to weigh the economic case, which will typically be made in favour of expansion. For the past 11 years or so—for as long as I have been an elected politician in west London—that has been my position. I am not necessarily against the expansion of Heathrow, but I am absolutely set against this particular proposal for expansion.
	We need to look at the balance involved, and my constituency represents some of that balance. Many of the staff who work at Heathrow and for the airlines live in my constituency. In fact, a senior person from British Airways, whose job is neither in lobbying nor public affairs, came to see me yesterday to give his own personal case as to why Heathrow expansion should go ahead. I used to be an admirer of BAA as a company, not least because when I lived in the United States, I saw the appalling condition of US airports in the early 1990s. At that point, Heathrow was comparatively a very good airport in very good condition, but I am afraid to say that those glory days for BAA have long gone. The fading grandeur of Heathrow is apparent, as the same graphics and infrastructure of the early '90s are still there today.
	I am still an admirer of British Airways as a business and I think it is part of our role in the House to stick up for important British businesses. However, on the proposal to build a third runway at Heathrow, I believe that the case against it is overwhelming. I say that partly due to my own local considerations, but I genuinely believe that the third runway will be detrimental to the UK.
	Let me first examine the hub argument. My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) developed some interesting arguments and a couple of other hon. Members started to consider the hub case. For me, the hub argument does not stack up. I am not convinced that London needs an aviation hub of the same size as that required by Amsterdam or Frankfurt. The hub argument is important, but I believe that it has been overdone in this case.
	London is itself a destination large enough to provide airport capacity sufficient for almost all the destinations we need. Last week, I flew to Skopje in Macedonia to give a presentation for the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. Incredibly rarely, Skopje cannot be accessed directly from any of London's five airports. It was most surprising to find how rarely that is the case for a European capital city destination.
	If we look at the population figures of the various competing hubs that we have heard about, London has population of 8 million, Frankfurt of only 670,000 and Amsterdam of only 750,000. It is quite clear to me that Frankfurt and Amsterdam need to become hubs in order to become viable as international aviation destinations at which people will change planes because there is simply not enough local demand to be able to do that. London is very different.
	Let us look at the example of the United States. New York City is not a hub airport; neither is Los Angeles; virtually all the US hubs are located in the middle of the continent—in places such as Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Houston. The geography of London does not seem to suggest that we should be Europe's largest hub: we are at the edge of the continent.
	The loss of hub status can, however, be quite traumatic. St. Louis in the 1990s is an interesting example. After TWA was bought by American Airlines, St. Louis lost its hub airport—the famous Lambert Field airport. St. Louis was the home town of Charles Lindberg and has an incredible aviation history. When it lost its airport, it had a significant negative impact on the city's economy in the early to mid-90s, but it is worth remembering that St. Louis has a population of only about 600,000. The disproportionate impact of the loss of the airport on the economy of St. Louis was far greater than the impact that any individual hub airport would have on London.
	I am not necessarily against London Heathrow being a hub, but we need to get it in perspective, because I think that the hub argument has been overdone. British Airways, however, desperately needs London Heathrow to be a hub. I am not someone speaking in a "bash British Airways" mood: as I said earlier, it is important for us to support some of our companies. British Airways employs 43,000 people. I am not sure whether it still is a FTSE 100 company, but it certainly was and may still be so. However, this is not the same argument as saying that it is essential for London to have a hub airport to compete with Frankfurt or Amsterdam.
	Does a hub provide business? I guess it does, but we have to keep it in perspective. When people change planes, it provides some business; there is a boost to the economy if people stop to eat, shop or just to have a coffee. Again, however, we have to get the balance right between this obsession with the hub airport on the one hand, and the deep economic impact and degradation that it is causing across west London and in areas beyond, including in my constituency.
	The other argument, which is being put out by the Future Heathrow group, is the supposed loss of Heathrow's status in terms of the number of destinations that it serves. If I am not mistaken, there is a table showing that Heathrow has fallen in that regard from No. 2 in Europe in the 1990s to No. 5 now. That might be a compelling argument, were it not for the fact that, with its five airports, London serves massively more destinations today than it did 15 years ago, when that table was first drawn up. Who would have thought 15 years ago that people could fly to Rzeszów, to Bydgoszcz, and to Bialystok, in Poland? Fifteen years ago, the only Polish destination people could fly to from Heathrow was Warsaw. Now, greater diversity is available, thanks to a much better use of our five airports around London.
	Some people might say that that change has happened only because of the end of the cold war, but let us look at France. I might be wrong, but I think that some 20 years ago, people could fly only to Paris, Lille and Marseilles from Heathrow. Today, they can fly to an incredible wealth of destinations from London airports. Much of the reason why Heathrow has declined in importance is not a lack of investment or of expansion; rather, it is the relative success of airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair. Let us face it—that is a very important factor that has not been brought out in this debate. So I do not think that a hub should be seen as essential in itself. It is helpful for London to have an important hub airport, but it is not vital. Again, I refer Members to the example of New York city, which seems to cope perfectly well without having a US hub airport.
	In the brief time available, I want to cover a little of the thinking on the geography of the flight path for the third runway, because this is very important. The Government have said that the eventual package will include an initial cap on additional flights from the new runway at 125,000 in a year, and a Government pledge that any new slots after that point would be "green slots" allocated only to airlines that use the newest, least polluting aircraft. I am not sure that that will satisfy anybody in my constituency. The flight path for the third runway takes in north Westminster, north Kensington, Hammersmith, south Acton, north Chiswick and so on. These are all new communities that, although not totally untouched, were largely untouched directly by aircraft noise. They will now be directly impacted on. That is a lot of people living under that flight path.
	Let us think about the people living under the existing flight paths, as well. The implication is that none of the environmentally friendly aircraft will fly over their heads; instead, people in places such as Fulham, in my constituency, will have the noisiest, most polluting aircraft flying over them. Nobody in my constituency, either in Hammersmith or in Fulham, is going to be satisfied with this solution. Obviously, we welcome the abandonment of proposals on runway alternation, but nobody is going to be satisfied with this. Who is to say that things might not change over time? I think that the Secretary of State gave a commitment earlier that there would be runway alternation on the third runway, but who is to say that that will not alter over time, and that the people of Hammersmith, on whom aircraft noise does not currently impact directly, will not have it right through the day, along with night flights?
	I am not convinced by the hub argument or by many of the economic arguments. The overwhelming environmental impact on west London, and on my constituents in particular, will be horrendous, and we should vote tonight to throw out the third runway.

Hugh Bayley: I want to start by declaring an interest. My older sister lives in a mediaeval house in Harmondsworth, a village that, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) said, will be encircled by Heathrow airport if the third runway goes ahead. The house would be just a few hundred yards from the end of the runway. Because I have that interest, I will not speak about the local environmental impact of the proposal. Many other Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), have spoken eloquently about that. Over many years, he has won the respect of constituents across the political spectrum for the way in which he has dealt with this issue.
	I do, however, want to speak about the economic consequences of the decision on the third runway for Yorkshire and, indeed, the north of England more generally, and about the environmental impact on the country as a whole. I am not persuaded that the Government have made the case for a third runway; nor, I should add, am I persuaded that the Conservatives have articulated a viable alternative to the Government's proposal. It is the devil of a job to square the circle and reconcile the demand from the public for more flights with the commitments made by the House and the country to limit carbon emissions. The Government seek to do that by imposing strict environmental controls, but—as has been pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) and others—whether those commitments are met by the airline industry remains to be seen.
	Let me explain my own reservations. First, I do not believe that a business case has been made. In the autumn,  The Economist devoted almost an entire issue to considering the business case for Heathrow, and decided that the case had not been made. One would think that such a liberal, free-market newspaper would find a business case if there was one to be made. Secondly, I do not believe that expanding Heathrow's capacity is the best environmental option, or that the best economic option for our country as a whole is to concentrate more flights and more economic development in the south-east of England rather than, by means of airport policy, spreading it across the country as a whole.
	Every plane that flies from London to north America flies over the north of England. If, instead of taking off from London, those planes took off from Manchester, they would save some 400 miles' worth of fuel and pollution on a round trip, and about half an hour of travel time. Passengers landing at Manchester, or at one of the other northern or midlands airports, could be in London in the same time if we built a 200-mph fast rail link. I have advanced that argument for a number of years, and many more people are advancing it now.
	For the rail link to be viable, it would have to be affordable. The fare could not be £100; it would have to be, say, £30. I believe that that is possible, however, because many airlines would bulk-buy seats on the trains. They would sell Newark to Manchester and Manchester to London as a package, and an airline buying 500 seats a day from a train operator would obviously be able to buy at a keen and affordable price.
	I am not arguing that the country should have a second hub in the north of England, because I believe that we can have only one hub in the United Kingdom. Nor am I arguing that the single hub should be in the north rather than the south. However, I do believe that we need a policy that spreads the increase in flights—which is happening because of consumer demand—around the country. We should spread the economic development that results from that, and we should also spread the pollution: if all the pollution is concentrated in one area, it will clearly have a greater impact than if it is distributed more widely.
	The key argument in favour of expanding the central hub is that when people transfer from one flight to another, more flights to more destinations can be provided. Some 35 per cent. of Heathrow passengers fly in on one plane and out on another: a third of the volume of flights consists of transfer flights. Concentrating more flights as a whole in London for people whose journeys originate in the south-east of England, as well as those whose journeys originate from other parts of England or from Scotland or Wales, naturally draws business from other airports and makes their business less competitive.
	Manchester, for example, used to operate direct BA and British Midland flights to north America. Therefore, those airlines thought that was a viable option, but the flights have been withdrawn because at the margin they are not seen to be viable. Manchester will never compete with London in any way or form, but I think that if there were the fast rail link, that would attract enough business for there to be a few direct flights from Manchester to north America. Those living in the north of England would then get the benefits not only of those flights, but of transfer flights to destinations that are not currently served; there might be one flight a day from Manchester to Turin, for instance.
	Business people in the north of England need to travel to meet their customers, business associates and suppliers in other countries just as much as do those in London and the south-east, but when travelling from Yorkshire to almost any destination it is quicker to take the train to King's Cross, the tube or Heathrow Express to Heathrow, and then to fly from Heathrow than it is to go to a regional airport in the north of England.
	I get complaints from Nestlé, whose biggest factory in the world is in York. It is extremely difficult to travel between its global headquarters near Geneva, in Vevey in Switzerland, and its York factory. There are similar complaints from Aviva Life, whose headquarters are in York, and I am sure other MPs with constituencies in the north of England get similar complaints. We must develop our transport and aircraft policies for the benefit of the country as a whole, not just for London and the south-east of England.
	I have supported the case for a north-south high-speed rail link for many years. I think it would help businesses in the north of England. It would bring some additional passengers to north of England airports, but it would also make Heathrow more accessible to passengers from the north of England who need to fly. I have lobbied for that, and I am pleased to see the proposals the Government have set out in their "High Speed Two" document.
	The Government have done just enough to secure my vote tonight; that will disappoint Opposition Members. I am sure this will not be the only vote we have on Heathrow expansion, however, and whether the Government continue to secure my support depends upon how vigorously they pursue the high-speed rail argument. If there is as much determination and drive behind it as behind the Heathrow policy, they might just keep me on board.
	I must confess, however, that I found it extremely difficult to decide how to vote. When I signed the early-day motion of my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), I did, of course, register my close family interest in the third runway issue. I realise that if I were to vote for the motion tonight, I would be open to the charge that I had put a personal interest before other considerations. I do not believe that is the case, but I would not be able to disprove it, and that is one of the factors that has influenced my decision.
	I congratulate both main Opposition parties on calling this debate. I regret that I cannot support them in the Lobby tonight, but I think they have done a service to the House and the country, and certainly to the communities around Heathrow airport, by calling it and focusing our attention on this issue.

Adam Afriyie: I think that overall, the decision to build the third runway is a bad decision; it is the wrong decision for the country. Before I begin my speech, however, I must say that I thought the Secretary of State's attitude was insensitive; he did not deal with the issue seriously, and he was brash and full of bravado. He had adopted the approach that attack was the best form of defence. He attacked my Front-Bench colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers), and I was thinking of raising a point of order as I was so concerned by the bullying tone in which he addressed her, when she had made a clear, concise and measured statement. The Secretary of State was loud and bombastic; to paraphrase Shakespeare, his speech was full of sound and fury but it signified very little. There was not much content in what he said, other than, "We've made the decision and we're going to march ahead," and when Members asked him about the alternative, he just said, "No, we've ruled that out," but there was no explanation as to why.
	The thrust of what I want to say is that when the facts change, sensible, reasonable people change their minds. Several Conservative Members have done so on this issue, and, with the additional and changing evidence, I think that even one or two Liberal Democrats have taken a slightly different view—and certainly many Labour Members have changed their views. Nobody is arguing for Heathrow to close or for it to be threatened.

Adam Afriyie: I appreciate that, but on issues such as Cranford and mixed mode, different views have been held in different constituencies; I know that because Old Windsor, in my constituency, will be affected seriously and views have changed there over time. To be fair, what I said was not criticism—it was praise. I praise anyone who would change their mind if the facts are changing, because that is the right thing to do. What would we be doing here otherwise? Surely people must be reasonable and accept the evidence as it is and as it appears.
	There is capacity at Heathrow for expansion; the Government's own figures show that up to 85 million passengers could be accommodated just with larger aircraft and by using the airport in a slightly different way. The argument I make is not even an argument against expansion in air travel. The world has changed, as have the circumstances. In 2003, when the White Paper was developed, it contained information from two or three years earlier, so much of the information in that predict-and-provide document is now about 10 years out of date. I welcome the fact that the White Paper will be updated, because that is the right approach to take. Several of the predictions and several of the observations made in it have already not proven to be correct—that is certainly the case given the downturn in the past 12 months.
	What changes are taking place at the moment? One is that we are now in a recession. A major downturn is occurring, and as NATS has said, there was an 8 per cent. reduction in flights in December compared with the previous December. That change must surely be taken into account when making this decision. We have discovered today that Schiphol has been laying off workers and reducing its operations. As 2 million or 3 million people could be unemployed over the next 12 to 24 months, surely it logically follows that the number of flights will reduce to a certain degree, especially given the reducing economic activity. I am not arguing that, in the long term, demand for air travel will not increase again, but this gives us three to five years in which we can look at the alternatives and make a decision based on that delayed time scale. The urgency came from the fact that we would be running out of capacity. If there is an international downturn and air travel does not grow as fast as predicted in the White Paper, that changes the date by which this decision must be made.

Norman Baker: I am happy to agree with that. I was casting no aspersions at all on the hon. Gentleman or on many of his colleagues who genuinely believe that the third runway is right. I was referring to evidence of collusion between BAA and the Department, but I fully accept that that he and others have made up their minds independently on that issue.

Clive Efford: I have already given way twice and there are others who wish to speak. I am sorry if I have rattled the hon. Gentleman's cage, but that is how it is.
	Let us have a look at what the Tories are saying where they are in power. Let us look at Mayor Boris and the island, for which my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) made a powerful case. But it does not represent the position of the Conservative party in the House. The Conservative party has got into a schism about airport expansion. It does not know whether to go one way or the other. The Mayor, who actually has power and influence, is pushing for a new airport in the Thames estuary. The Conservative party does not know which way to go on any airport—all it knows is that it does not want Heathrow to expand. Much as I have misgivings about airport expansion, I will not join the Conservatives in the Lobby today.
	I turn to the position of the Government. Labour Members have made some reasonable requests today, most notably about the national policy statement. Heathrow is totemic in environmental terms, and it will be made so whether it is talked about in this bubble of the House of Commons or elsewhere. The matter should be brought back to the Floor of the House; let us have a vote on it in the near future. That would be a test of our commitment on climate change. We passed the Climate Change Bill, which is now an Act. There is the Committee on Climate Change, and we intend it to consider the measures that we have put in place for airport expansion. We are also going to give powers to the Civil Aviation Authority and the Environment Agency. Labour Members have questioned whether we are earnest in our commitments in relation to those measures. I believe that they should be brought back to the Floor of the House for debate so that people can question, amend and alter them if they need to be strengthened. That is an essential role that the House can play in future on the issue—an issue to which we will return, as others have said.
	I want to mention the high-speed rail link before I sit down. I do not believe that it will ever be built. I support it and want it, but according to the Conservatives' own figures it would cost £17 billion to introduce. I have always felt that we could make much more efficient use of our resources by building a dedicated freight line and taking freight off our passenger rail network. That would be cheaper and would not require all the engineering that a high-speed rail link would need. It would allow us to create more capacity and improve timetables on the existing passenger network. We could deliver it much more cheaply and, in addition, take a great deal of freight off the road. Currently, 12 per cent. of our freight goes by rail; that represents a significant increase in the past 10 years, but if we could create more freight capacity the figure would rise further. One freight train is the equivalent of 50 heavy goods vehicles; an aggregate freight train is the equivalent of 120 HGVs. Building a dedicated freight line rather than going for a high-speed rail link, which would knock off only marginal amounts of time from journeys up and down the country, would make an enormous contribution to the environment.
	In conclusion, I hope that the Government are listening to what we on the Labour Benches are saying. There is great concern that past promises on Heathrow have not been adhered to. This issue is a major test of our commitment on climate change, and that means that the House, the Committee on Climate Change, the Civil Aviation Authority and the Environment Agency must have a role, to ensure that we deliver on the commitments that we have made.

Sammy Wilson: There have been some powerful speeches in this debate, especially from Members whose constituencies are affected by this proposal. Although local issues are involved, however—in Northern Ireland I have seen in another role how airport expansion and changes to airports can generate heat and anxiety in local communities—what we are discussing is not a local issue; it is about an asset of national significance and extreme importance to outlying regions of the United Kingdom.
	At a time when we are going into recession and are concerned about jobs and the future of the economy, we should be aware that a project such as this can sustain many thousands of jobs and generate many additional thousands of jobs, and at the same time encourage the private sector to see that we are friendly to business in the United Kingdom. That pushes us to the conclusion that there is an economic case for the expansion of Heathrow from the point of view of the regions, such as Northern Ireland, where we are out on a limb and need good linkages to a central infrastructure that then radiates out to the rest of the world. It is important that those linkages are not only maintained but strengthened.
	I listened to what the hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) said in putting the Opposition's case. A high-speed rail link, whether or not it is feasible or ever happens, will not help Northern Ireland unless we are going to build a bridge or a tunnel as well. I would welcome those links, but I suspect that that is a dream for people in Northern Ireland. It is therefore essential that we have the ability to link into Heathrow. There is already concern that because of the pressures on slots at Heathrow, and now the link-up between BMI and Lufthansa, those slots could be lost to what are regarded by the bigger airlines as more profitable flights.

Alan Simpson: I shall vote for the motion, which was originally tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan). I do not care who is in the Lobby with me or what contradictions they bring with them. Given that the House is not allowed to vote specifically on the Heathrow third runway, the vote this evening will be seen as a surrogate for that. I say to all those who wriggle about and pretend that it will not, that that is how it will be perceived outside.
	I hope that those who live in the vicinity of Heathrow will forgive me for making next to no comments about their circumstances. That is not through lack of sympathy, but simply because I regard the matter as an overwhelmingly national and ecological issue. It is in that context that I want to address my remarks to the House.
	I get most dispirited about the House when it cloaks itself in delusions, and the most consistent delusion that has paraded itself around in this debate is that, when we come out of the present global crisis, we will somehow go back to business as usual, and that we will be able to carry on with this everlasting expansion, over-production, over-consumption and over-pollution. It simply is not going to be like that.
	Two years ago, the International Energy Agency issued a report that said that, by 2013, the world would face an energy supply crisis. It added the caveat that the only thing that might delay that crisis was the possibility of a global slump. It is some kind of lifeline, but that is what we are immersed in at the moment. When we come out of it, in whatever way we do so, that energy crisis will be waiting for us.
	The scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change revise their climate change predictions forward every time they meet, in such a way that we now have a window of opportunity of probably six to eight years in which to make profound changes to the way in which we think about the framework of the economies in which we live, and in which we hope that our children will be able to live.
	I like to think that President Obama understands some of this, and that he understands the urgent need for change now. I also like to think that my own Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change understands that. He has done many inspirational things, and one of them is so inspirational that I do not think the House has a clue what it means. It is that we are committed to introducing annual carbon budgets at the end of this year. It will come as a huge shock to households, businesses and other parts of our infrastructure when they have to live within their annual carbon budget.
	The delusional aspect of the provisions will become apparent only when we try to hide behind the presumption that the budgets can be forward-projected, that we do not really have to meet them until 2050, that, in the context of aviation, they can be premised on the basis of planes that do not exist yet, and—worse still—that the emissions trading scheme will somehow get everyone off the hook. The presumption will be that we will be able to continue to pollute as we like, while paying others to clean the planet up in ways that we will not do. The emissions trading scheme is a cheats' charter. It will not work, because everyone involved—including ourselves—is part of the cheating game. If we want to address how we should deliver our climate change targets, we need to do so in the now. That is the context in which I want to address the issue of the third runway.
	Just a couple of months ago, Jim Hansen from NASA said that, if we were to survive the century, we would have to constrain climate change within 2° C. That probably means lowering the carbon threshold to 350 parts per million, not the 450 parts per million that we are currently talking about. That would be an astonishing target for us to set ourselves. Jim Hansen is still vaguely optimistic about that, but James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia theory, has now given up on that premise. He says that, by 2050, we are likely to have had to divide the UK into three, just to survive. One third would have to accommodate the entire population of 57 million. The second third would have to be given over to intensive agriculture, and the third handed back to nature. If that happens, I suspect that not a single person who is squeezed into that space in central England will be sitting there saying, "Well, I'm glad we got that third runway. It's certainly made a difference to the quality of our lives." That is nonsensical.
	If we are going to take carbon budgets seriously, we have to begin to budget for them now. How we reduce aviation's contribution to carbon emissions overall is one question; how we deal with the additional emissions resulting from a third runway is quite another. The figures in the official documents state that 11.7 million tonnes of carbon equivalents will be emitted as a result of the third runway, on an annualised basis. How do we translate that? If we were to offset it by something positive, it would mean that we had to deliver and install 7.2 million solar roofs in the UK. If we take out apartment blocks and everything north facing, it probably means the entirety of south-facing roofs in the UK.
	If we did not offset those emissions through a positive counter, we might have to reduce the carbon impact of things that we currently do. That could work out as the equivalent of taking 4.5 million cars—one in six—off the road. We might want to do that in a fairer way and say to every car owner that for two months every year their cars would be impounded—and they would just have to live with it. If we did not want to do that, we could look into reducing electricity consumption. To achieve the required offset would mean permanently disconnecting 5 million households from the electricity supply for the duration of the existence of the third runway. We might want to share the impact of that more equally, so we could say that every household could take a share of the cut—every day each of us would have to do without any energy in our homes for four and a half hours.
	Those are the real costs that we have to trade off among ourselves to live within an annualised carbon budget—and the budget is not even static. To get to the position we need to be in by 2050 effectively means shrinking our carbon footprint on the basis of an annualised 3 per cent. reduction per year, probably right through the entirety of this century. That requires meeting transformational demands, affecting the whole way we live. I suspect that, in the future, we will live in more localised or more regionalised economies. I think we can live simpler and better lives, but I will tell you this, Mr. Deputy Speaker—whichever way we try to make this stack up, a third runway is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.

Andrew Slaughter: I grew up with Heathrow, living for about 30 years under the flight path in Fulham before I moved to the gentler and quieter climate—quiet at the moment, that is—of Shepherd's Bush. I concede to my Front-Bench team that planes were noisier and dirtier then, but like the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall), I could never describe myself as an opponent of Heathrow at any stage. As he said, it is a driver of the west London economy as well as a direct employer.
	I do not want to get into an auction of misery, but my constituents may not be the most at risk—perhaps unlike those of my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell). I have a large constituency in Shepherd's Bush and I have a prospective constituency in Hammersmith with a total combined population of about 160,000 people. I have done canvassing in both those areas and I can say that very few people there—almost no one—believe that Heathrow should be closed. Indeed, I believe that even the Mayor of London has resiled from that position. People hold that view despite the fact that we know that Heathrow is in the wrong place as an historical accident and despite the fact that we know that the airport potentially affects the health and safety, quality of life and convenience of people living in west London.
	As with so much about living in London, people accept that this issue comes down to a balance between environmental and economic considerations. The one organisation that has never accepted that balance is BAA, which has fought time and again for expansion by any means. That is why I have spent the 25 years that I have been active in west London politics fighting against Heathrow expansion. The terminal 5 planning application is now legendary and we heard earlier about the letter that went out from BAA at that time, effectively saying, "If you give us terminal 5, we will never apply for a third runway". That, too, has become legendary. It shows that this issue has become not just a matter of tactics but one of trust for many people living in London.
	I am sorry that I have only eight minutes to talk about a matter of such complexity. I concede that these arguments are complex. If we look into the issue of noise alone, we find as many different views as there are objections. We cannot agree on a system for measuring it; we cannot agree on what level it takes effect; we cannot agree on the flight paths; we cannot agree on what changes in technology will mean. It is indeed a subjective feeling that people have: one partner of a couple might feel affected while the other did not.
	Pollution, surface transport, the transport infrastructure—all these issues are hugely complicated; I accept that. I also accept what my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have done in getting mitigation of these measures. No mixed mode, what they say are stringent and binding controls, and a gradual expansion are substantial mitigating effects, but if the existing airport is in the wrong place and we accept that, that is not a reason to build what is effectively another airport in the wrong place. One only has to look at the maps—even the maps that BAA provides—to see where those flight paths go, and to ask whether a massive increase in aircraft movement across the largest conurbation in the country is sensible.
	That brings me to the motion, which is a Labour motion; that is why it is so reasonably written. It sets out the environmental case and asks the Government to look again at the case for a third runway, using the planning legislation process that we agonised over so much to get in place. It is the motion of my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), and I did feel for my right hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, West (Ruth Kelly) when she was putting questions about the motion to the Opposition Front Benchers, who clearly have not read it. They should have asked my hon. Friend. He knows what it is in it.
	It is the Tories who should have a problem voting for this motion, because as we have heard, over the course of a year they have turned from being qualified or unqualified supporters of a third runway at Heathrow into—well, what? I am not talking about the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire), who has always been consistent. I am talking about people such as the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts), part of whose peroration to the citizens of Hounslow within the last year we heard quoted. He went on to say the following about the third runway at Heathrow:
	"although I recognise this will not be welcome by this audience we have to accept that...things sometimes have to happen that people don't wish...we cannot allow, sadly, one community—however badly affected—to stop if there is a strong economic argument."
	Within the last year to 18 months, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) and the hon. Members for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) and for Chipping Barnet (Mrs. Villiers) have all endorsed, even with weasel words, the third runway and expansion at Heathrow.
	It is the abandonment of that position and its replacement with a policy vacuum that has allowed, where angels fear to tread, the Mayor of London to step in with his proposal, which, according to  The Times last week, is now not just a policy of supporting the Thames estuary airport. It said:
	"Although Johnson has described Heathrow as 'a planning error of the 1960s', his advisers believe it could continue to work with two runways even if the new hub is built."
	So what we have from the Tories at the moment is six runways in London. This is the party of the environment. This is the party that believes it has the answer to airport expansion in the south-east. The Tories may believe that this is clever politics and that by tabling a motion, they have successfully lured me for the first time into what they think is their Lobby—although I maintain it is a Labour motion that we are voting for. I take comfort in doing that for this reason. I believe that the third runway will never be built, because of the sheer illogicality of it and the fact that time has moved on. All that is being asked for in this motion—certainly from the Labour Benches—is for the Government to look again at the aviation and rail strategies for the south-east and the country as a whole and to come up with a better solution, which is there.
	In due course, this debate will prove to be a complete figment, and I will continue, just in case I am being complacent about this, to campaign against the third runway. But the debate will also expose the vacuity and hypocrisy of the Opposition, and the fact that they are doing this for pure political advantage. It will not be clever politics; in the end it will be stupid politics, because already, and more quickly than they think, the country and opinion-formers are seeing that they will say anything. Somebody used the phrase "student politics" earlier today, and that is exactly what we have here. The Tories will do anything at all to get into power, but they cannot go on doing that; eventually, their chickens will come home to roost. These chickens will indeed come home, and if the airport is built in the Thames estuary, they may have a problem with bird flights, as well. They should think about that as they vote tonight; I will do so with a clear conscience.

Rob Marris: I declare an interest, in that I am a member of the Transport and General Workers Union, which is now part of Unite, which I understand supports the third runway at Heathrow.
	We have had a great debate today, as we often do on such controversial matters. In my brief remarks, I shall not address the issue of what I call the concrete footprint of a third runway—the destruction of the village of Sipson and other surrounding areas—as that is primarily, although not solely, a matter for the MP representing the people who live in that area. Instead, I shall focus my remarks on the environmental issues and what I regard as the mish-mash of the Conservative Opposition motion before us today.
	On the three primary environmental issues relating to local residents—air quality, surface traffic and noise—I take heart from the statement that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport made to this House on 15 January. On noise, he said:
	"the Government committed not to enlarge the area within which average noise exceeded 57 dB."
	He then went on to set out some safeguards, which he reiterated to the House today, in respect of the following understandable question that people ask: can these promises be relied upon, in the light of what has happened in the past in terms of Heathrow and airport expansion? He said:
	"the air quality limit is already statutory, and we will also give the noise limits legal force".
	I take great heart from that.
	The Secretary of State also said:
	"We will give the CAA a new statutory environmental duty to ensure that it acts in the interests of the environment...and that it follows guidance from myself and my right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Energy and Climate Change."
	He also referred to the important safeguards that
	"the independent regulators would have a legal duty and the necessary powers to take the action—or require others to take it—needed to come back into compliance. In the case of noise, the matter would be for the CAA. In the case of air quality",
	the matter would be for
	"the Environment Agency".—[ Official Report, 15 January 2009; Vol. 486, c. 357-358.]
	I take heart from that.
	On the procedures and processes that this matter involves, I take a different view from many in this Chamber, because I think that they have been putting on the Government the sorts of things that would be done by a planning inquiry. Surface transport, the overdevelopment arguments often put forward in our constituencies, and the air quality and noise arguments are very important issues, but they are also ones for the planning process. On surface traffic, the Government have not been given credit for the battle they fought in Brussels—in the European Union—to have tighter controls on emissions from passenger vehicles; this Government stood up for the 137 g per kilometre provision, which is a step forward. It will indirectly affect the air quality on the ground around Heathrow, whether or not it has a third runway, because the cars delivering people to and from Heathrow will be less polluting.
	Another issue that has been mentioned today is the economics, and there are two ways of looking at that factor. The first is the economics of what the runway will do for the economy and so on—and I understand the scepticism that I have heard about the figures. The other aspect is whether it will be economic to build a third runway at Heathrow. Some hon. Members seem to be trying to substitute the decision of this Chamber for a commercial decision made by the owners of Heathrow—currently Ferrovial, a Spanish company. I think that a third runway at Heathrow will never be built, because of the following things: high-speed rail; video links; the price of oil; the opprobrium associated with flying; and the question of whether hub airports make any sense, given that, as we all know, the big expansion in recent years has been undertaken by carriers such as Ryanair and easyJet—point-to-point carriers that do not go for the hub.
	I understand that from this Government and previous Governments there is no direct subsidy for Heathrow. Indirect subsidy is provided, particularly through the lack of excise duty and tax on aviation fuel. The Government ought to end that unilaterally, rather than wait until there is an agreement within the European Union. The emissions trading scheme will clamp down, and I think that, in view of the entire context, a third runway will not be built.
	What I object strongly to on the part of Conservative Members is, to use an old-fashioned biblical phrase, the whited sepulchre—although in this case it is a green sepulchre: fancy on the outside, but a pile of bones on the inside. That is what this motion is, because it tries to have it both ways. With all due respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), I suspect that he never believed in his wildest dreams that this motion would be debated on the Floor of the House. It is a contradictory motion that has been adopted today by the Conservative party, particularly in respect of the environmental stuff. It is like the old Canadian saying from the first world war, when people were trying to get Quebec to decide to stay in the confederation—they said that there would be conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription. That was a great political point made by their Prime Minister at the time, and although it was pretty nonsensical, it convinced the Canadian people. The approach here is that we will clamp down on air traffic if necessary, but we will not necessarily clamp down on air traffic. That contradictory, fake position faces both ways.
	The Conservative motion is also hypocritical. I suspect that many Members of this House fly moderately frequently for leisure purposes, let alone for business; they may fly to go on holiday in Iceland, to go yachting in Corfu or to go birdwatching in Paraguay. I regard it as hypocritical, and an insult to my constituents, that they are being told in terms, "We want to restrict flights so you can't fly. We're rich, and we'll carry on flying." If they were really being intellectually honest about it, they would say, "Let's ration flying. Let's not do it through a price mechanism so that poor people can't fly."
	The Liberal Democrats have just as much of a hypocritical position, and they should back off it. It is the kind of position that we face in our constituencies all the time from some people—I stress the word "some"—who say, "I don't want a mobile phone mast on my street." When such people are asked whether they have a mobile phone, they reply that they have, and when they are asked whether they use it, they again reply yes, but they do not want a mast on their street. That is the kind of hypocrisy that we face from people who are flying around the world on their holidays. The Conservative motion is contradictory, and I urge hon. Members to vote it down.

Lynne Jones: I agree with every word said by my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), and I will support the motion in the Lobby tonight. I agree with him about the need for consensus across all the political parties if we are truly to tackle this major global issue of climate change. We came together not so long ago and passed the Climate Change Act 2008, and only two hon. Members voted against it. We imposed on ourselves strict targets that must be met by 2050, and as a result, the Government have been able to claim global leadership in tackling climate change.
	It is one thing to have targets: it is another to achieve them. We achieved our Kyoto targets, but that was on the back of a temporary phenomenon—the dash for gas and the closure of coal-fired power stations. We are, even now, contemplating building a new coal-fired power station, and we are increasing our greenhouse gas emissions in this country, as are our partner countries in Europe. So when it comes to competition between Heathrow, Paris, Schiphol and Frankfurt, we are all in this together. We will all have to take difficult decisions about whether we can continue with the predict and provide policy in aviation.
	We must also consider the science. When the Climate Change Act was first considered, we had a target of 60 per cent., but that was based on out-of-date science. We then realised that we needed an 80 per cent. target, based on the report by the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is now some four years out of date. The latest science tells us that even that target may not be sufficient. It is not even the target that we need to consider, but our trajectory, and how we meet it. We cannot put action off. The latest science tells us that we are probably already at the tipping point. Predictions show that the melting of the Arctic ocean and ocean acidification, which were not expected to take place for another 50 or so years, are taking place now. The target that we must aim for if we are to reduce the increase in global temperature to the 2° C necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change is now more like 350 parts per million—and that is the level that we are at today.
	We have to take urgent action. We cannot wait one or two years: we have to start now. We cannot look just for energy efficiencies and otherwise carry on as we are. We cannot look to some technological fix, as yet undiscovered. We have technologies that will enable us to tackle climate change, and we can be optimistic, but only if we start now. That means that all sectors of our economy have to participate. As the chief scientific adviser has said, the UK's target means that all sectors must make a major contribution and achieve step changes in past performance. That applies to the aviation industry perhaps even more than to other emitters of greenhouse gas, because its emissions are made in the atmosphere and have a greater impact than those on the ground.
	It is therefore inconceivable that we will meet our climate change targets with a target for aviation that says that we will not get back to 2005 levels of emission from the aviation sector until 2050. Even if that were achievable in the scenario painted by the Government, it is still not good enough. If we do not get it right, and if we do not take a lead in this country, as is absolutely necessary if we are to reach agreement at Copenhagen, that could have an impact on unemployment and on our economy. It will also have a global impact, through the water wars that will take place and the refugee problem. What happened in the early 1990s—with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the consequences that followed for refugees seeking asylum, and the impact that that had here, as well as the impact that the wars in places such as Somalia and Darfur had here—will be as nothing compared with the impacts of dangerous climate change, which we are now embarking on.
	If we are embarking on such change now, we cannot contemplate going ahead with a third runway at Heathrow airport. It is as simple as that. If this country wants to offer global leadership, it must not go ahead with the project, which makes a mockery of all our claims that we are serious about meeting the targets and tackling climate change.
	We can tackle climate change—but what will happen if we do not? I sometimes wonder whether I did the right thing by bringing children into this world. I am from the luckiest generation. I was born in 1951, after the second world war. I had the benefit of the post-war welfare state: health care, free education and a good pension scheme from the public sector and from my current employment. When I look at our children, I see that they have a lot less opportunity and a lot less to look forward to than I had. If we are going to be true to our children, and to children all over the world, we must take climate change seriously. That means that we must not go ahead with the third runway at Heathrow.

Greg Clark: The hon. Gentleman intervened earlier with a similar question, and I shall make our position very clear. The motion that we are debating is about a third runway at Heathrow, but if he is asking whether the Opposition will say no—for ever, any time, any place or anywhere—to airport expansion, that would clearly be ludicrous. Of course we are not suggesting that.
	By my assessment, 26 speeches have been made this afternoon. It is difficult to respond to each argument individually, but I believe that seven clear reasons have emerged as to why we should follow the precautionary principle. The first has to do with climate change, which featured in the speeches of my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) and the hon. Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) and for Lewes (Norman Baker). It was also referred to by the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher) and the hon. Members for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer), for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin), for City of York (Hugh Bayley), for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) and for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter). They and others all emphasised the climate change case.
	It was only last October that the House came together to pass the Climate Change Act 2008, which commits us to 80 per cent. cuts in greenhouse gases by 2050. However, passing an Act and setting a target are only the beginning of the process, not the end. If the 2008 Act is to mean anything, surely there needs to be a plan about how that target can be achieved. Decisions need to be taken that will advance us towards that target, rather than take us further away from it. As the hon. Member for Reading, West (Martin Salter) said, we have to walk the talk.
	It is extraordinary that, so soon after the Act was passed, almost the first decision of the Government is to approve a plan that would result in Heathrow becoming our biggest single source of CO2 emissions. By 2050, Heathrow—one single airport—would consume one fifth of the UK's entire carbon budget. In fact, the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton said that the figure could be as high as 30 per cent. As the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) said, that cannot make sense, not least because emissions from aviation, as a result of the phenomenon of radiative forcing, are widely thought to do two to three times the damage that ground-based emissions do.
	I turn now to the question of concessions. Ministers claim to have done a great deal to remove the third runway's negative consequences for carbon emissions with some eleventh-hour concessions, but sadly they do not stand up to scrutiny. Many hon. Members, such as the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), pointed that out.
	The first idea was that there would be an initial restriction ensuring that the runway used only half its capacity. Of course, we are not told just how "initial" that would be. It is simply absurd to imagine that private investors will pay for capacity and accept that they cannot use it.
	As many hon. Members have mentioned, BAA wrote a "dear neighbour" letter in 1999 to everyone around Heathrow. It said:
	"We have since repeated often that we do not want, nor shall we seek, an additional runway."
	The letter went on to say that, subject to permission being given for terminal 5,
	"an additional Heathrow runway should be ruled out forever."
	There is therefore form for these assurances being overturned.
	So unconvinced are the Government of their own commitment that they have already devised a scheme to allocate the additional capacity—the so-called "green slot" principle, which is their second mock concession. Once again, the Department for Transport can say only that the detail on green slots will be worked up in the future, but the idea is that only low-emissions aircraft would be allowed to use the new runway.
	Yet that simply means that the new aircraft will use the new runway, while all the most polluting planes are left to feel free to use the current runways. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) pointed out, that would mean noise for people who currently do not even have it.
	The third mock concession is the announcement that aviation should reduce its carbon emissions below 2005 levels by 2050. When will Ministers understand that a target is meaningless without a plan to attain it? Have they taken into account the consequences for other industries? If 30 per cent. of the carbon budget is taken up by aviation, where does that leave the rest of our industry? It is almost like the old game of Pacman, with the contribution from other industries being gobbled up by the single monster that is Heathrow.
	We know that the more environmentally friendly Cabinet members did their best to extract genuine concessions. However, they failed, and we should not delude ourselves that the third runway proposal would be anything other than catastrophic for our commitment to reduce emissions.
	I turn briefly to the question of air quality, a matter raised by my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) and by the hon. Members for Reading, West and for Hayes and Harlington. Nitrogen dioxide is already at levels that are likely to breach the EU air quality directive, which becomes mandatory next year. Many hon. Members pointed out that the Environment Agency, whose chairman is Lord Smith, a former member of the Government, has warned that a third runway would cause increased morbidity and mortality—in other words, that people would die needlessly.
	One of the contributors to poor air quality and CO2 emissions in dense residential areas is emissions from motor vehicles taking people to and from the airport. Hundreds of thousands more flights a year will mean millions more journeys by car through congested areas of London. Do we really want to turn London into the Mexico City of Europe—notorious for crawling traffic, blighting the lives of residents and travellers alike?
	Noise levels were mentioned by the hon. Members for Hayes and Harlington and for Sunderland, South and by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham. Two million people from Windsor to Brixton are already affected by the noise from London Heathrow. A third runway would make that worse. When the Government commissioned a study of noise, saying that it underlined their commitment to underpin policy with substantial research, they set aside the very research that they commissioned. The study was published and showed that the problem would be deepened, but its results were trashed. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham said, new areas such as north Westminster will be exposed for the first time.
	Many hon. Members urged the Government, in the words of the motion, to explore more fully the provision of high-speed rail to other major cities. My right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal, my hon. Friends the Members for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) and for Henley (John Howell) and the hon. Members for City of York (Hugh Bayley) and for Selby all mentioned high-speed rail. While other European countries have invested in high-speed rail networks, Britain has been left behind, with the channel tunnel rail as our only high-speed rail line.
	In France, before the TGV linked Paris and Marseille—a distance of 660 km—22 per cent. of passengers travelled between the two cities by rail; now 69 per cent. of them do so. Yet in Britain, 32 flights a day link London to Manchester, despite it being only 260 km away. A high-speed rail network linking London, including Heathrow, with the cities of the midlands and the north, and we hope Scotland in due course, could save thousands of flights, not only at London Heathrow, of course, but at other UK airports, including Gatwick, Stansted and regional airports, thus unleashing significant spare capacity.
	The economic case was question by several hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd), the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton and the hon. Members for Selby, for Richmond Park, for Hayes and Harlington, for Sunderland, South and for City of York.
	A report by the international consultancy CE Delft has suggested that the number of extra visitors to Britain was overestimated by a factor of 12 and their contribution to the economy by a factor of four in the paper on Heathrow expansion. There are flaws in the Government's case. For example, the net present value of the Government's proposal assumes that airport passenger duty counts as a positive value, when, of course, it is merely a transfer from the private sector to the public sector. As many hon. Members have mentioned, the idea that Heathrow, which is currently Europe's largest hub airport, will somehow wither away is not credible.
	The seventh theme that emerged from hon. Members' contributions was that of democracy. I respect the record of the hon. Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris) as a former Transport Minister, but he said that there was something strange about voting on an early-day motion that was signed by so many colleagues. I do not think that people outside the Chamber will understand the logic that hon. Members can sign to say that they agree with a motion and then vote against when it is debated. The idea that there is some sort of unwritten convention that that should not happen will strike people who listen to the debate as precisely the kind of murky practice that brings Parliament into disrepute. If we sign a motion, we ought to stand by that if it comes to a vote, especially when it is a balanced motion.

Edward Miliband: I will in a moment. The question then is, what burden should aviation bear? At times it has been hard to tell what the Opposition Front-Benchers' position on the issue really is, but some people in this House have implied that perhaps we should have a freeze in aviation.  [Interruption.] They say no. The truth, revealed by this debate, is that we are seeing opportunism from the Conservative party—the worst sort of opportunism, environmental opportunism.

Edward Miliband: The rest of industry would have to bear a bigger burden. That is true, but I have explained to the hon. Gentleman why the Committee on Climate Change thinks that is right.
	We are the only party in the House that has a clear position—an internationally leading position on aviation emissions. We say that by 2050, aviation emissions must be back to current levels. That is a target consistent with the 80 per cent. target. Why is that significant? Because for the first time we are saying that aviation expansion is conditional on improvements and reductions in carbon emissions. That is a significant commitment. The right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal thinks that we will have trouble at the international negotiations on the matter, but we will be in a world leading position in the international negotiations when we enunciate our policy. I will have trouble though persuading other countries to sign up to the target, because it is such an ambitious target.

Paul Beresford: I thank the Minister for coming. The one advantage of being the last man standing is that the gates might be open when he leaves.
	Let me first declare a simple interest and then add to it because of the specifics of the debate. I am a qualified and practising—admittedly very part-time practising—dentist. In addition, I am a member of the British Dental Association, the British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, the British Endodontic Society and the British Dental Bleaching Society. That explains why I become a target of considerable pressure on dental issues, so I hope the Minister will bear with me.
	I am trying to persuade the Minister to help us sort out a situation that has been confusing dentists and trading standards officers throughout the UK for a considerable number of years. If the Minister will bear with me, I will endeavour to explain a little of the process of dental bleaching and why the present situation is producing a dilemma for dentists.
	Bleaching by dentists has been around for a very long time. I first used dental bleaching about 30 years ago. My tutor was my now retired dental partner who qualified during the second world war, and his tutor was his father who qualified shortly after the first world war. It has been used for nigh on 100 years. In the early days, we used a 30 per cent. solution of hydrogen peroxide—better known as Superoxol. It was destructive to soft tissues, which needed to be protected; in those early days, that was done via a mechanism called a rubber dam. This is a small sheet of latex rubber with holes placed in it so that the teeth can go through; a tight seal then comes round the neck of the tooth so that the gingival and other oral soft tissues, including the lips, can be protected.
	The aim of bleaching is to remove discolorations from the teeth without harming the teeth themselves. The discolorations can come from a number of sources: from tobacco, hard water, tea, coffee and so on. Teeth may also be iatrogenically discoloured, the most famous example being tetracycline discoloration. In the early days of antibiotics, children were given an antibiotic called tetracycline, which was one of the early broad-spectrum bacteriostatic antibiotics and was widely used. While it dealt with the targeted infection, if taken by children it discoloured the developing teeth, sometimes to a grotesque degree.
	Second or adult teeth that may have received a blow can often darken quite quickly, particularly if the individual is young. The teeth most frequently hurt in this way are the upper incisors, particularly the upper central incisors. Endodontically treated teeth often darken, particularly if the operator has been unable to remove or has not removed all the pulpal tissue from the internal dentine.
	Increasingly nowadays, dental restorations are of a more cosmetically acceptable material. If someone is to have a filling, it is good to do it in a cosmetically acceptable way. It is becoming increasingly accepted as standard practice that when such restorations as porcelain crowns, porcelain veneers and porcelain inlays are used for restorations, it is sensible to bleach the teeth first. That achieves a benchmark colour to which the new restoration is colour-matched. As the patient's teeth become more discoloured over subsequent years, it is possible to use the same process to bring the teeth back to that benchmark level. Otherwise, we will end up with white teeth sticking out among the brown, which I have seen particularly in some areas of London.
	Dental bleaching is not available on the national heath, but I believe that in some cases it should be because it is the less destructive treatment. To provide a simple example, if a national health patient has badly tetracycline-stained teeth, the only option on the NHS to restore normal appearance is by extensive crowns or veneers. These are destructive to the teeth and much more costly, and in time they will need replacing. The cheaper approach is dental bleaching, which leaves the teeth intact and of an acceptable colour.
	Techniques of dental bleaching have improved. First, the dentist must check that the patient's teeth are in good order. Then there are essentially two different bleaching techniques available. The first is the so-called home technique, where the dentist constructs close-fitting clear trays that the patient wears for a period of time at home. The bleach trays are designed to hold the gel against the teeth but away from the soft tissues.
	The second method is so-called power bleaching, which is done in the surgery and generally uses much stronger hydrogen peroxide concentrations. The soft tissues are protected either with the aforementioned rubber dam or nowadays a foam that is set by an ultraviolet light. Some techniques advocate the use of light or heat source, although I personally believe that this does more for the image of the procedure to the patient than it actually benefits the bleaching process.
	Hydrogen peroxide is generally delivered in varying strengths of carbamide peroxide nowadays. These strengths vary between 10 per cent. and 38 per cent. carbamide peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide concentration delivered is lower. For example, 10 per cent. carbamide peroxide delivers approximately a 6 per cent. concentration of hydrogen peroxide. As logic will tell the Minister, the higher the concentration the faster the bleaching, but the more likely it is to produce sensitive teeth.
	I hope that the Minister understands from this that this material should be in the hands of a trained dental professional, as misuse can cause harm. Recent decisions of the General Dental Council state that dental bleaching by trained dental professionals is part of professional dental treatment. That has been accepted by the Secretary of State for Health for England, and I have written asking for the position of the Ministers of Health for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales on this issue. To date, the Minister for Health for Wales has replied and agrees with the position taken by the Secretary of State. I await the post from Scotland and Northern Ireland.
	The reason for this preamble is to explain to the Minister that the dangers of the material when misused are understood, and that organisations such as the British Dental Bleaching Society run certifying training courses to ensure that the dental professional teams undertaking this treatment are properly trained. Unfortunately, there are a number of non-dental professionals, in beautician salons in particular, who are illegally bleaching teeth. Sadly, some of these individuals are using a material called chlorine dioxide, which, although it produces an initial appearance of bleaching teeth, actually damages them.
	As the Minister will be aware, the fly in the ointment is the European cosmetics directive, which restricts the sale of tooth-bleaching materials containing more than 0.1 per cent. hydrogen peroxide. Clearly, this makes eminent sense when applied to over-the-counter medicines, but from a dental treatment point of view 0.1 per cent. hydrogen peroxide is absolutely useless.
	Enforcement of the cosmetics directive is in the hands of local government trading standards officers on behalf of the Minister's Department. Most trading standards officers and departments are too busy to bother dentists. Also, most of those who do look at the issue recognise that higher concentrations of hydrogen peroxide delivered as part of dental treatment are quite different from over-the-counter sales. Indeed, some trading standards officers have visited dental surgeries that I know of and have accepted the use of such products as part of dental procedures, but not for over-the-counter sales. Unfortunately, there are a few trading standards officers who continue to threaten to prosecute dentists using more than the 0.1 per cent. concentration. I was approached in the last few weeks after dentists in Northern Ireland and, of all places, Redcar received quite aggressive letters threatening prosecution. Incidentally, if the Minister ever contacts the Redcar trading standards department, he might like to point out that his Department is no longer called the Department of Trade and Industry.
	In 2005, the European Commission Scientific Committee on Consumer Products recommended that, although tooth-whitening products containing 0.1 to 6 per cent. hydrogen peroxide are not safe to be sold over the counter and should not be used freely, they are safe to be used after the approval of, and under the supervision of, a dentist. In December 2007, the SCCP reinforced this, and in November 2008 the Council of European Dentists unanimously stated that it
	"Recognizes the need for regulation of availability of tooth whitening products at EU level on the basis of the December 2007 SCCP opinion; Feels that the aim of such regulation should be to protect consumers from potential harmful effects of excessive exposure to tooth whitening products and to enable distribution of the full range of tooth whitening products, under the responsibility of a dentist, as justified by scientific evidence; Expresses concern about continued delay in implementing the SCCP opinion and calls on all actors involved to ensure that a solution is found as soon as possible in the interest of patient safety; Supports the intention of the European Commission to amend the Cosmetics Directive in line with the final SCCP opinion and Encourages the European Commission to schedule a vote to amend the Cosmetics Directive at the earliest opportunity and urges Member States to contribute to a positive outcome."
	That leaves me with two simple requests for action to sort out this nonsense. First, I urge the Minister to press the Commission to change the directive speedily. The nonsense to which I refer has continued for many years, in the face of the evidence of many decades of successful and safe bleaching in the hands of dental professionals. Such techniques are commonly used in the rest of the world; it is the EU that has got itself bureaucratically out of step.
	I realise—and, indeed, remember from my days as a Minister—that it will probably take some time to get the change through the EU bureaucracy, no matter how much the Minister pushes for it. It would therefore be helpful for him to suggest to trading standards departments that a more enlightened approach should be adopted to dentists using these materials in the way intended. However, I back their approach to such products when they are used as over-the-counter medicines. It would be more logical for trading standards officers to concentrate on other public sources of bleaching gels that are being sold over the counter by the likes of beauticians who are not legally qualified to undertake any dental treatment.
	At present, dentists and others in north America laugh at our smiles. We must stop that, and the way to do that is to allow the full range of dentistry, including bleaching.

Gareth Thomas: Let me begin in the usual way, by congratulating the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) on securing a debate on an interesting and important subject. As a result of my research for this purpose, I am substantially better informed about tooth whitening than I was a short time ago. While I nevertheless cannot begin to compete with the hon. Gentleman in terms of knowledge and expertise, I hope that I can set out some of the context of the way in which the Government have handled the issue of reform of the cosmetics directive so far. I undertake to try to keep the hon. Gentleman informed as the reform process gets under way. Of course, if he wishes to bring constituents or colleagues in the dental profession to see me to discuss the matter further, I shall be happy to receive them.
	Let me now set out what the Government seek to do. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman will perceive a good deal of agreement in our respective positions, although I recognise the frustration felt by his profession at the current position. As he said, the use of hydrogen peroxide is controlled under the cosmetics directive. He will acknowledge—and, I am sure, the House will welcome the fact—that my Department takes its responsibilities under the directive, and under the United Kingdom's implementing regulations, extremely seriously. The need to ensure that only safe cosmetic products are available to consumers, and that consumers are equipped to make informed choices about which products to use and the content of those products, is an important part of the Department's role.
	Hydrogen peroxide has been used in tooth whitening for many years, but, as the hon. Gentleman knows, only in the last 10 to 15 years has the desire to have much whiter teeth really taken off with consumers in the UK. I know how long some of the products described by the hon. Gentleman have been used, but I hope he will accept that the trend—stimulated in part by widespread use by consumers in the United States—has been noteworthy in the last 15 to 20 years in particular. However, there has been some confusion, as well as concern, about the regulation and enforcement of tooth whiteners under the EU cosmetics directive, so I welcome this opportunity to put the record straight and to explain what we are doing to deal with that confusion.
	Let me give some of the context. I shall not go into all the lengthy detail of previous court cases in the late 1990s, but in 2001 the House of Lords ruled that tooth-whitening products should be regulated under the directive, on the basis that the whitening of teeth was a cosmetic process and discoloured teeth were not regarded as a handicap under the medical devices legislation. The directive is implemented in the UK by the Cosmetic Products (Safety) (Amendment) Regulations 2008, which—as the hon. Gentleman said—are enforced on my Department's behalf by local authority trading standards departments.
	Annexe 2 of the cosmetics directive is a list of substances that cosmetics products must not contain except subject to certain restrictions and conditions. Entry number 12 in that annexe is the listing for hydrogen peroxide, which is the most widely used substance to whiten teeth. The directive states that in oral hygiene products—a definition that includes tooth whiteners—the maximum permitted percentage of hydrogen peroxide present or released is 0.1 per cent. The scientific dental and medical consensus is that this is not sufficiently strong actually to whiten teeth. It is important to note that the directive applies to all products—those sold over the counter and those provided by dental practitioners. Since 2001, the UK has been leading the way in seeking an amendment to the cosmetics directive to allow a greater percentage of hydrogen peroxide so that the bleaching effect will actually work and teeth will be whitened. The process has proved to be far from easy to conclude, and has so far not resulted in an amending directive that has received a positive vote from the member states.
	A large element of the debate on reform of the directive in relation to use of hydrogen peroxide in tooth whiteners has been around the issue of safety versus efficacy. In other words, we need a level of hydrogen peroxide in products that will actually whiten teeth, but that level must not cause harm to the health of consumers. That is one part of the reason why it has taken so long to get to the stage that we are at today.
	Let me explain what has happened. First, scientific papers were submitted to the European Commission's scientific committee on consumer products showing that allowing a greater percentage of hydrogen peroxide in tooth whiteners would not be detrimental to the health of consumers. The scientific committee's view was that a greater percentage could be allowed, but it indicated that products with a higher percentage should not be used by habitual smokers and regular alcohol drinkers. That led to a discussion of what habitual meant in these circumstances. This was the start of several years of back-and-forth questions from the member states and the Commission to the scientific committee seeking clarification on that issue. There were also a number of other questions relating to use by children and pregnant women and consumer exposure to hydrogen peroxide as a whole. Without going into the protracted detail of all this scientific questioning, I can tell the hon. Gentleman that we are now at the position where we have had six opinions from the scientific committee and two draft directives from the Commission proposing changes. I should also say that we have had excellent advice from the office of the chief dental officer and his staff.
	In October 2008 the Commission presented an amending directive to the experts committee on cosmetics products. It is the result of the protracted discussion I have outlined. It would allow tooth-whitening products containing a maximum of 0.1 per cent. hydrogen peroxide to be freely available to consumers, as they are today. Tooth-whitening products containing up to 6 per cent. hydrogen peroxide would be available to consumers after assessment and first application by a dental practitioner. The remainder of the kit could then be taken home and used by the consumer as directed by the dental practitioner. For kits containing 6 per cent. hydrogen peroxide, this procedure would need to be repeated every time a consumer wanted a tooth-whitening course. Products containing more than 6 per cent. hydrogen peroxide would not be available to the consumer at all. They would only be for use by dental practitioners and should not be used on children under the age of 18.
	The draft directive also describes a number of labelling requirements that must appear on tooth-whitening products. Unfortunately, as a number of member states still had questions and concerns on the draft directive, the Commission did not put the text forward for a vote in October. It is hoped that the text will be re-presented at the next cosmetics expert working group in February. As the hon. Gentleman made clear, until there is a change to the directive, the maximum hydrogen peroxide level remains at 0.1 per cent. My officials and the chief dental officer's office at the Department of Health will continue to apply pressure on the Commission to bring the situation to a speedy conclusion. Any assistance that the hon. Gentleman's colleagues in the dental profession could bring, through their own contacts in other member states, would be extremely welcome.
	The hon. Gentleman also alluded to the fact that trading standards departments have also been faced with the uncertainty of when and if the cosmetics directive will be amended. That has been exacerbated by manufacturers of tooth-whitening products, beauty salons and, indeed, some dental practitioners who have anticipated changes to the directive and offer products and treatments that contain more than 0.1 per cent. hydrogen peroxide. He will recognise that trading standards departments are required to consider action if they become aware of products being supplied, whether by dental practitioners or over the counter, that contain more than 0.1 per cent. hydrogen peroxide.
	I recognise that the hon. Gentleman's colleagues in the dental profession face uncertainty and considerable frustration, but he will recognise the difficult position that trading standards officers are in as a result of their need to implement the directive, as required by UK law. This will not offer him complete reassurance, but to the knowledge of the Local Authorities Coordinators of Regulatory Services—LACORS—no dentists have yet been prosecuted in the UK in this regard. That does not mean that none have been visited by their local trading standards departments, and I recognise and accept the veracity of what he said about the experience in Redcar and the experience of the other dental professionals whom he said have been visited. I am aware that a number of trading standards departments have sought to take action against those selling home kits containing about 10 per cent. hydrogen peroxide. I am sure that he will continue to recognise that that is clearly a situation, regardless of reform, that we would want to see continued.
	I also join the hon. Gentleman in his concern about the use of other treatments such as the use of chorine dioxide. It is worrying that spas and, possibly, dentists are using alternatives that do not work or, worse still, are detrimental to health. I should take this opportunity to urge the dental industry and others to use only treatments that are proven to be effective and safe. In the meantime, any instances of bad practices by spas and others clearly should be brought to the attention of trading standards, so that action can be taken.
	Finally, may I return to the key point of the hon. Gentleman's purpose in securing this debate? We want reform of the directive and we are seeking to achieve that, as we have been doing for some time. I hope that we will get a positive outcome shortly, but he and his colleagues in the dental profession can be assured of my officials', and now my attention, for this issue. I would be happy to keep him informed outside the Chamber and, if it is useful, to meet some of his colleagues in the dental profession to discuss this further. I hope that that will not be necessary, and that we will achieve reform shortly, but I leave that offer on the table.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 House adjourned.